The Shipping News - Fourth Estate 25th anniversary edition

Annie Proulx

E. Annie Proulx was born on August 22, 1935 in Connecticut USA, the state where her mother’s family of farmers, mill workers, inventors and artists have lived since 1635, but has spent most of her life in Vermont. She is the eldest of five girls.

She has three sons. Her interests include cooking, music, wine, fly-fishing, good conversation, canoeing, camping, bird hunting, gardening, landscape work, carpentry, painting, homemade bread, knots, and wood-lore. She describes herself as an ‘omnivorous reader, happy with a mining journal or a speed-boat-freak-mag if nothing else is available’. She likes the cold and snow, sharp seasonal changes, weather extremes.

E. Annie Proulx wrote her first novel, ‘Postcards’, in her fifties and followed it with ‘The Shipping News’, which won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the US National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1994. In April 1998 she was presented with the US National Magazine Award for excellence in Fiction. She is also the author of a short-story collection, ‘Heart Songs’ (Fourth Estate 1994). ‘Accordion Crimes’, was published by Fourth Estate in October 1996, and was followed by the publication of ‘Brokeback Mountain’, a short story which was published alone in October 1998. ‘Close Range’, a collection of short stories (which includes ‘Brokeback Mountain’) was published in June 1999.