Valerie Martin
United States
Tight, ironic first-person prose that traps the reader inside a narrator whose moral blindness is the whole point.
Martin was born in Sedalia, Missouri, and has taught English for decades at Mount Holyoke College, the University of Massachusetts, and Sarah Lawrence College; her 1990 novel Mary Reilly, retelling Jekyll and Hyde from the housemaid's point of view, was adapted into a costly 1996 film starring Julia Roberts and John Malkovich and won her the Kafka Prize.
Property (2003), a first-person account of a brutal 1828 Louisiana plantation marriage narrated by the mistress herself, won the Orange Prize the year it was published, an unusually fast turnaround for the award.
She has also written a biography of St. Francis of Assisi, Salvation, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her fiction.
Their books in the atlas
- 2003
PropertyLvl 5historical fiction
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