Mary Doria Russell
| Mary Doria Russell | |
|---|---|
Russell at the annual conference of the American Library Association, January 2008
|
|
| Born |
August 19, 1950 Elmhurst, Illinois, US |
| Occupation | novelist |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of Michigan |
| Period | 1995–present |
| Genre | Science fiction, historical fiction |
| Notable works | The Sparrow, A Thread of Grace, Doc, Epitaph |
| Notable awards | James Tiptree, Jr. Award, BSFA Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award, John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Kurd Lasswitz Preis, ALA Top Pick in Historical Fiction, Ohioana Fiction Prize |
| Website | |
| marydoriarussell |
|
Mary Doria Russell (born August 19, 1950) is an American novelist.
Russell was born in Elmhurst, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Her parents were both in the military, her father a Marine Corps drill instructor and her mother a Navy nurse. She was raised as a Catholic but left the church at age fifteen, and her struggles to figure out how much of that culture to pass on to her children fueled the prominence of religion in her work.
She graduated from Glenbard East High School in Lombard, Illinois, which has registered its chapter of the National English Honor Society in her name. She is also a major sponsor of a Glenbard East scholarship established in memory of English teacher Richard Cima.
Russell earned her B.A. in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana; her M.A. in Social Anthropology at Northeastern University, Boston; and her Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Russell's doctoral research concentrations were in bone biology, craniofacial biomechanics, and paleoanthropology. She twice won the Trotter Award for outstanding work on bone by a doctoral student and went on to teach graduate-level osteology in the Anthropology Department of the University of Michigan and human gross anatomy at the Case Western University School of Dentistry in Cleveland, Ohio.
Her major scientific publications focused on Neandertal studies, and included work proposing a biomechanical explanation of the supraorbital torus (browridges) and statistical analyses to distinguish taphonomic evidence of secondary burial from that of butchery.
Russell's fiction has been recognized for meticulous research, fine prose and narrative drive. She has worked in a variety of genres.
Russell's first two novels, The Sparrow and its sequel Children of God—sometimes called the Sparrow series or Emilo Sandoz sequence—(Random House Villard in 1996 and 1998) have been called speculative fiction and focused on the religious and psychological implications of first contact with aliens. Both explore the problem of evil (theodicy) and how to reconcile a benevolent, omniscient, all-powerful deity with lives filled with undeserved suffering.
The Sparrow won the Arthur C. Clarke, BSFA, and Tiptree annual science fiction book awards (below), and it was the basis for Russell winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1998.; in German translation, Sperling won the Kurd Lasswitz Prize for Best Foreign Novel. Children of God won the American Library Association's Readers Choice award. Together, the novels won the Spectrum Classics Hall of Fame award and earned Russell the Cleveland Arts Council Prize for Literature.
...
Wikipedia