Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr is an American author born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1973. He studied history at Bowdoin College and received his MFA from Bowling Green State University. He is the author of two short story collections, two novels, and a memoir. He lives in Boise, Idaho. His novel All the Light We Cannot See (2014) tells the parallel stories of a blind French girl and a German boy in World War II, tracing their separate paths toward an inevitable meeting in Saint-Malo, France, during the Allied invasion. The novel spent 216 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the Indies Choice Book Award for Adult Fiction in 2015 among many other honours. It was adapted by Netflix into a limited series in 2023. Doerr's second novel Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021) interweaves storylines from multiple centuries, united by a single classical text. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and received wide critical acclaim. His story collections The Shell Collector (2002) and Memory Wall (2010) have also won major prizes. He is one of the most beloved American fiction writers of his generation.