Ann Patchett

Patchett's father was an LAPD captain who arrested both Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan; her mother, Jeanne Ray, became a novelist too. Patchett moved to Nashville at six after her parents' divorce and has lived there ever since.

Bel Canto (2001), inspired by the 1996-97 Japanese embassy hostage crisis in Lima, Peru, won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize, a rare double. Her other novels include State of Wonder, Commonwealth, and The Dutch House.

In 2011 she co-founded Parnassus Books, an independent bookstore in Nashville, becoming one of American fiction's most visible advocates for the physical book trade alongside her own writing.