Karen Joy Fowler

Karen Joy Fowler
Karen Joy Fowler at the 2013 Texas Book Festival.
Born	(1950-02-07) February 7, 1950 (age 67) Bloomington, Indiana, US
Education	University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Davis.

Karen Joy Fowler (born February 7, 1950) is an American author of science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. Her work often centers on the nineteenth century, the lives of women, and alienation.

She is best known as the author of the best-selling novel The Jane Austen Book Club that was made into a movie of the same name.

Fowler was born in Bloomington, Indiana, and spent the first eleven years of her life there. Her family then moved to Palo Alto, California. Fowler attended the University of California, Berkeley, and majored in political science. After having a child during the last year of her master's program, she spent seven years devoted to child-raising. Feeling restless, Fowler decided to take a dance class, and then a creative writing class at the University of California, Davis. Realizing that she was never going to make it as a dancer, Fowler began to publish science fiction stories, making a name for herself with the short story "Recalling Cinderella" (1985) in L Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 1 (1985) and Artificial Things (1986), a collection of short stories.

She began publishing sf with "Recalling Cinderella" in L Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Vol I (anth 1985) edited by Algis Budrys

Her work as a genre writer tended toward eccentric tales of implausible history. Often these tales had a feminist theme or mindset. Her first novel, Sarah Canary (1991), was published to critical acclaim. The novel involves a group of people alienated by nineteenth century America experiencing a peculiar kind of first contact. One character is Chinese American, another putatively mentally ill, a third a feminist, and lastly Sarah herself. Similar to some of her other work, notably her award-winning short story "What I Didn't See," Fowler's first novel, Sarah Canary, has been controversial in regards to its actual genre. Fowler states, "If I tell [my readers] that I believe that Sarah Canary is in fact an extraterrestrial, they usually react with shock." Fowler meant for Sarah Canary to "read like a science fiction novel to a science fiction reader" and "like a mainstream novel to a mainstream reader." Both novels have been incorporated with aspects of science fiction that typical readers would overlook. Fowler's intentions were to leave room for the readers’ own interpretation of the text.