Andrea Barrett

Barrett studied zoology in graduate school before abandoning science for fiction, a background that has shaped nearly everything she has written since, populating her stories and novels with naturalists, doctors, and explorers working at the edges of what their era understood.

Ship Fever and Other Stories (1996) collects linked tales of nineteenth-century scientific life, its title novella following a young Canadian doctor through a lethal typhus epidemic among Irish famine emigrants quarantined on Grosse Île; it won the National Book Award in 1996.

She has continued writing linked story collections and novels revisiting the same recurring families of scientists across generations, including The Voyage of the Narwhal and Servants of the Map, while teaching for years at Williams College.