E. Annie Proulx

Proulx worked for decades as a freelance journalist and rural how-to writer, publishing her first story collection only in her fifties after raising three children largely alone; her fiction career didn't fully take off until she was nearly sixty.

The Shipping News, researched during repeated trips to Newfoundland, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in the same year, an unusually rare double. Her story collection Close Range, containing 'Brokeback Mountain,' later became an Academy Award-nominated film.

She has lived in remote parts of Vermont, Wyoming, and Newfoundland over the decades, drawing her fiction's severe, weather-driven landscapes directly from wherever she settles.