KAYE GIBBONS

Kaye Gibbons wrote Ellen Foster, her first New York Times bestselling novel, at the young age 26. Praised as an extraordinary debut, Eudora Welty said that "the honesty of thought and eye and feeling and word" mark the work of this talented writer, and Walker Percy stated that , "Ellen Foster is a Southern Holden Caulfield, tougher perhaps, as funny…a breathtaking first novel."

Ellen Foster also won the Sue Kaufman Prize for first fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Special Citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation, the Louis D. Rubin Writing Award, and other major awards. Both Ellen Foster and Gibbon's second work, A Virtuous Woman were chosen as Oprah Book Club selections in 1998, leading the New York Times bestseller list for many weeks. 

Gibbons received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to write a third novel, A Cure for Dreams, which was published in 1991. The book won the 1990/PEN Revson Award, as well as the Heartland Prize. Her subsequent books include Charms for the Easy Life, Sights Unseen, On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, Divining Women, and The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her husband and five children.

© Joy Harris Literary Agency