Best-selling novelist Andrea
Barrett '74, who won the National Book Award for Ship Fever, was featured on Garrison Keillor's “Writers Almanac” on
Tuesday, Nov. 16.
“It's the birthday of the novelist
Andrea Barrett, born
in Boston, Massachusetts (1954). She is known for
writing about botanists, oceanographers and geologists in novels such as The Forms of Water (1993) and The Voyage of the Narwhal (1998),”
Keillor said on his daily public radio program of literature and history.
“She grew up on Cape
Cod, and spent most of her time near the ocean, fascinated by sea
life. She decided to study biology [at Union College]
and went on to study zoology in graduate school.
“At some point, she decided she
was more interested in history than biology, and started studying medieval
religion. It was while she was writing papers about the Spanish Inquisition
that she realized she should be a writer. She said, 'I'd go to the library and
pull out everything, fill my room and become obsessed with the shape and the
texture of the paper, and the way the words look, trying to make it all
dramatic. At some point I realized: 'Hey, this isn't history, and I'm not a
scholar.'”
To read the complete transcript or
hear the show, visit the “Writer's Almanac” web site at: http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/.