Donna Tartt

About

Donna Tartt is an acclaimed American novelist, essayist, and critic known for her meticulously crafted stories, atmospheric settings, and explorations of obsession, morality, and the darker sides of human nature. Born in 1963 in Greenwood, Mississippi, she developed a passion for literature at an early age and later studied at the University of Mississippi before transferring to Bennington College in Vermont, where she graduated in 1986. Her debut novel, The Secret History (1992), became an international bestseller and established her reputation for sophisticated psychological fiction. She followed it with The Little Friend (2002), a dark mystery set in the American South, and The Goldfinch (2013), which follows a young boy whose life is transformed by a tragedy and a stolen painting. The Goldfinch won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Tartt’s relatively small but influential body of work has been translated into dozens of languages, earning her a devoted international readership.