Jane Alison

Jane Alison (born 1961) is an Australian author.

Early life and education

Born in Canberra in 1961, Alison spent two years in Australia as a small child, growing up mainly in the United States as a child of diplomatic parents. She attended public schools in Washington, D.C., and then earned a B.A. in classics from Princeton University in 1983. Before writing fiction, she worked as an administrator for the National Endowment for the Humanities, 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

Alison's first novel, The Love-Artist, was published in 2001 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and has been translated into seven languages. It was followed by The Marriage of the Sea, a New York Times Notable Book of 2003. Natives and Exotics, from 2005 was one of that summer's recommended readings by Alan Cheuse of National Public Radio. Her short fiction and critical writing have recently appeared in Seed; Five Points; Postscript: Essays on Film and the Humanities; and The Germanic Review. She has also written several biographies for children and co-edited with Harold Bloom a critical series on women writers. She has taught writing and literature at Columbia University, Barnard College, Bryn Mawr College, and for writers groups in Geneva, Switzerland. She also participated in an on-line MOOC course for University of Virginia. Alison lived in Karlsruhe, Germany for 10 years, then moved to Miami, Florida in 2007 and began teaching in the MFA Creative Writing program at the University of Miami.

Bibliography

Memoir

• The Sisters Antipodes, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)

Fiction

• The Love-Artist: A Novel, (Picador, 2002)
• The Marriage of the Sea, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition, 2003)
• Natives and Exotics, (Harvest Books; 1st edition, 2006)
• Nine Island, (Catapult, 2016)
• Villa E: A Novel (Liveright Publishing/ WW Notion, 2024), a fictionalized account of the lives of two leading figures of 20th century modernist architecture movement, Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier, set in the French Riviera region.

Translation

• Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid, Oxford U. P.

Criticism and other non-fiction

• Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, (Catapult, 2019)

External links

• Jane Alison's Home Page
• Artfully as He Writes: New York Times review of The Love Artist
• Fluid Dynamics: New York Times review of The Marriage of the Sea
• Transplants: New York Times review of Natives and Exotics