Ann Patchett is one of America's most popular and critically-acclaimed novelists. Her most well-known book, Bel Canto, won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was an international bestseller; Patchett's four other novels, one memoir and one book-length essay have also been warmly embraced by critics and the reading public.

Patchett was born in Los Angeles in 1963 and raised in Nashville. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 1990, she won a residential fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars. It was named a New York Times Notable Book for 1992. In 1993, she received a Bunting Fellowship from the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. Patchett's second novel, Taft, was awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best work of fiction in 1994. Her third novel, The Magician's Assistant, was short-listed for England's Orange Prize and earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Her next novel, Bel Canto, won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in 2002, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was named the Book Sense Book of the Year. It sold over a million copies in the United States and was translated into thirty languages. Patchett's 2004 book Truth & Beauty, a memoir of her friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Entertainment Weekly. Truth & Beauty was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won numerous other awards. Her fifth novel, Run, was published last year, as was her book-length essay, What Now?, based on a commencement address she gave at Sarah Lawrence College in 2006.

Patchett was the editor for Best American Short Stories 2006. She has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Gourmet, and Vogue. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband, Karl VanDevender.