Literary Birthday – 19 August – Mary Doria Russell

Happy Birthday, Mary Doria Russell, born on 19 August 1950.

Mary Doria Russell Quotes

1. I write to understand people and events that puzzle me; my novels appeal to readers who have the same hunger to go below the surface of things. This makes me hard to categorise as a novelist, but it also keeps my books in print, year after year.
2. All my books are historical novels. It’s just that some of them take place in the future.
3. Nobody starts out knowing they can really write, and that they have something worth writing about, and that they can finish what they’ve started, and that it will be published and noticed, let alone praised.
4. I know that publishing is a crap shoot and every book is another throw of the dice. Even if you’ve already written five novels and even if they’ve been warmly received by the critics, and even if they’ve sold pretty damned well, past performance does not guarantee future results.
5. Back in graduate school, I learned that I have just four good hours a day when I can concentrate on demanding mental tasks. While writing what became The Sparrow, I learned to guard those hours like a Doberman — no PTA projects, no appointments, no distractions.

Source for quotes: Author’s website

Mary Doria Russell is a retired American novelist of speculative and historical fiction. Her first novel, The Sparrow, was chosen as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by Entertainment Weekly and won the Arthur C. Clarke Prize, the British Science Fiction for Best Novel in 1998. She is best known for The Sparrow, and its sequel, Children of God, about a Jesuit priest who travels to a faraway planet. Doc was nominated for the Pulitzer in 2011, named a Notable Book by the Kansas State Library, and won the Great Lakes Great Reads prize. Her last novel, The Women of the Copper Country, tells the story of the young union organizer Annie Clements, who was once known as America’s Joan of Arc. Her novels are studied in literature, theology and history courses in colleges and universities. Follow her on Instagram.

Source for photograph: Author’s Media Kit

by Amanda Patterson
Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: The Complete Author Birthday Calendar