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Jane Alison (born 1961) is an Australia-born author based in the U.S.

Early life and education

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Jane Alison was born in Canberra in 1961, the child of Australian diplomats.[1] When she was four, her parents met and soon exchanged partners with a couple in the U.S. Foreign Service whose family mirrored her own.[2][3][4] Her name and nationality changed, and she subsequently grew up in Los Angeles; Quito, Ecuador; and Washington, D.C., where her mother took Alison and her siblings when the second marriage dissolved. She attended public schools in D.C. and then earned a B.A. in classics from Princeton University in 1983.[5][6] Before writing fiction, she worked as an administrator for the National Endowment for the Humanities,[7] as a production artist for the Washington City Paper, as an editor for the Miami New Times, and as a proposal and speech writer for Tulane University. She also worked as a freelance editor and illustrator before attending Columbia University to study creative writing.

Literary career

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Alison's first novel, about the exile of Roman poet Ovid, The Love-Artist, was published in 2001 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.[8][9] It was followed by The Marriage of the Sea, a novel set in New Orleans and Venice about four men, three women, food, architecture, love, despair, and water, named a New York Times Notable Book of 2003.[10][11] Natives and Exotics,[12] from 2005—about one family's centuries-long effort to belong to a land, set in Scotland, the Azores, Australia, and Ecuador—was one of that summer's recommended readings by Alan Cheuse[13] of National Public Radio.[14] Her highly acclaimed memoir, The Sisters Antipodes,[15][16] traces her upbringing in a doubled, mirrored family and was excerpted as a "Modern Love" column.[17] She followed it with a nonfiction novel, Nine Island,[18] about living alone in Miami and wrestling with the problem of sexual love; at the same time, she worked on translations of Ovid's stories of sexual transformation, Change Me.[19] Her 2019 book on the craft and theory of writing, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, is about finding unconventional structures in narrative beyond the masculo-sexual dramatic arc. The book is widely taught and cited in creative writing programs across the country, as well as being named a Best Book of 2019 by Atlantic Monthly and elsewhere.[20][21] Her most recent book is Villa E, a novel inspired by the legendary battle between Modernist architects Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier.[22] Her short fiction and critical writing have appeared in The Paris Review, New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Oprah Daily, Lit Hub, and elsewhere, and her books have been translated into a dozen languages, as well as adapted to music by composer Thomas Sleeper.[23][24]

She has taught writing and literature at Bryn Mawr College and the University of Miami and since 2013 has been professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia.[25] She divides her time between Charlottesville and Campeche, Mexico, with her partner, architect Edward Tuck. [26]

Bibliography

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Memoir

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  • The Sisters Antipodes, ISBN 0-15-101280-6 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)

Fiction

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Translation

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  • Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid ISBN 0199941653 (Oxford, 2014)

Criticism and other non-fiction

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  • Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, ISBN 978-1948226134 (Catapult, 2019)

References

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  1. ^ "Alison, Jane (1961-) - People and organisations". Retrieved 28 June 2019 – via Trove.
  2. ^ Jane Alison, The Sisters Antipodes, Houghton, 2009
  3. ^ ["In 1965, when I was four, my parents met another couple, got along well, and within a few months traded partners. This was in Canberra, where my father, an Australian diplomat, had just brought us home from a posting in Washington. The other couple were American but diplomats, too, finishing a post in Canberra before returning to the U.S. Both men were in their early thirties, tall, slim, and ambitious; both women were smart and good-looking. Both couples had two little girls the same ages, and the younger girls shared a birthday and almost the same name. This was my counterpart, Jenny, and me. The two families had so much in common, people said: they must meet." from The Sisters Antipodes, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009]
  4. ^ "An incomparable family story, exquisitely, stunningly told"
  5. ^ Jane Alison '83 discusses her first novel, The Love-Artist
  6. ^ [1]
  7. ^ Jane Alison, a concentrator in classics and a member of the class of 1983, used her training in Latin and Greek to get a first job at the National Endowment for the Humanities
  8. ^ Farrar, Straus & Giroux
  9. ^ Michiko Kakutani, "A Poet Who Makes Love as Artfully as he Writes"
  10. ^ Margot Livesey, "Fluid Dynamics"
  11. ^ An intricate, elegant novel that ponders the connections among love, illusion and fidelity in the permutations of eight central characters behaving in two romantic and romanticized cities, New Orleans and Venice.
  12. ^ Sue Halpern, "Natives and Exotics: Transplants"
  13. ^ Alan Cheuse: An Armful of Books for Summer
  14. ^ National Public Radio Excerpt: 'Natives and Exotics'
  15. ^ Sydney Morning Herald, "Family Swap Triggers a Memoir Scandal"
  16. ^ Jane Alison talks family heartache and tragedy to Louise France in The Guardian
  17. ^ Jane Alison, "Swapping Fathers, Swiftly"
  18. ^ Publishers Weekly interview with Jane Alison, "The Difference Between Solitude and Loneliness"
  19. ^ Change Me, Oxford University Press
  20. ^ Atlantic Monthly, Best Books of 2019
  21. ^ Kate Waldman, "The Deeply Wacky Pleasures of Jane Alison's Meander, Spiral, Explode"
  22. ^ Readers House interview, "Jane Alison Explores the Boundaries of Storytelling and Memory"
  23. ^ Thomas Sleeper, composer, "The Sisters Antipodes," mini-opera
  24. ^ Thomas Sleeper, composer, "Xenia," a song cycle
  25. ^ https://creativewriting.virginia.edu/people/jane-alison]
  26. ^ The Art of Living: "We recently visited with Edward Tuck, an architect from New York, and his partner, author Jane Alison, at their newly renovated house in the Centro Historico."
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