Donna Tartt is an American writer whose first two novels, The Secret History and The Little Friend, were critically acclaimed and translated into thirty languages. Tartt won The Little Friend's WH Smith Literary Award in 2003. Her novel The Goldfinch was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize. Don and Taylor Tartt's daughter, she was born in Greenwood, Mississippi but raised in Grenada, Mississippi, 32 miles away. She wrote her first poem at the age of five, and at the age of 13, she first saw publication in a Mississippi literary review. She enrolled at Mississippi University in 1981, pledging to Kappa Kappa Gamma's sorority. Her writing caught Willie Morris' attention as she was a freshman. Following Morris' recommendation, Barry Hannah, then an Ole Miss Writer-in-Residence, admitted Tartt to his short story graduate course where she ranked higher than the graduate students, Hannah said. She moved to Bennington College in 1982, where she was friends with fellow students Bret Easton Ellis, Jill Eisenstadt, and Jonathan Lethem, following the suggestion of Morris and others. She studied classics at Bennington with Claude Fredericks. She splits her time between New York City and Virginia.... Read More
