Valerie Martin

Valerie Martin
reading at the 2014 Gaithersburg Book Festival
Born	1948 Missouri
Genre	novelist; short story writer.

Valerie Martin (born 1948, Missouri) is an American novelist and short story writer.

Her novel Property (2003) won the prestigious Orange Prize. In 2012, The Observer named Property as one of "The 10 best historical novels".^[1]

Life

Although Martin was born in Missouri, she was raised and educated in New Orleans, Louisiana.^[2] She graduated from the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

She has also taught at Mount Holyoke College, Loyola University New Orleans, The University of New Orleans, The University of Alabama, and Sarah Lawrence College, among other institutions.

Her other fictional works include Set in Motion (1978), Alexandra (1979), A Recent Martyr (1987), The Consolation of Nature and Other Stories (1988), The Great Divorce (1993), Italian Fever (1999), The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories (2006), Trespass (2007), and The Confessions of Edward Day (2009), as well as Salvation: Scenes from the Life of St. Francis (2001), a biography of St. Francis of Assisi. Her most recent novel, The Ghost of the Mary Celeste, was published in January 2014.

Her 1990 novel, Mary Reilly, a retelling of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from the point of view of a servant in the doctor's house, was released in 1996 as the Columbia TriStar Pictures film, Mary Reilly. It is directed by Stephen Frears and stars John Malkovich as Dr. Jekyll and Julia Roberts as Mary.

The short subject film Surface Calm (2001) is based on her short story of the same title from her first book, Love (1977).

With her niece, Lisa Martin, she wrote the children's book, Anton and Cecil.^[3] She has one child, Adrienne, born in 1975.

Works

Novels

• Set in Motion (1978)
• Alexandra (1979)
• A Recent Martyr (1987)
• Mary Reilly (1990) ISBN 978-0-307-83387-7
• The Great Divorce (1993)
• Italian Fever (1999) ISBN 978-0-307-83385-3
• Property (2003) ISBN 978-0-307-42734-2
• Trespass (2007)
• The Confessions of Edward Day (2009); The Confessions of Edward Day. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. 14 December 2011. ISBN 978-0-307-80941-4. 
• The Ghost of the Mary Celeste: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. 28 January 2014. ISBN 978-0-385-53351-5. 

Collections

• Love: Short Stories (1976); Love: Short Stories. Lost Horse Press. 1 January 1999. ISBN 978-0-9668612-3-5. 
• The Consolation of Nature, and Other Stories (1988)
• The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories (2006)

Non-fiction

• Salvation: Scenes from the Life of St. Francis (2001)

Children's

• Lisa Martin; Valerie Martin (2013). Anton and Cecil: Cats at Sea. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. ISBN 978-1-61620-246-0. 

Awards

• World Fantasy Best Novel nominee (1991) : Mary Reilly
• Nebula Best Novel nominee (1991) : Mary Reilly
• Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction Best Novel winner (2003) : Property^[4]

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Valerie Martin.

• Valerie Martin homepage
• Audio recording of Valerie Martin reading from Property at the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar
• Valerie Martin at the Internet Movie Database
• 1990 audio interview of Valerie Martin at Wired for Books.org by Don Swaim