Anthony “Tony” Doerr, born near Cleveland, attended Bowdoin College in Maine as a history major with an emphasis on post-1945 American history and graduated cum laude. He went on to Bowling Green State University in Ohio, earning an MFA in writing, with a concentration in fiction.
Before and after college, Doerr worked and traveled: to Alaska, New Zealand, Kenya, the Windward Islands; on sheep ranches and as a cook in Telluride and on the "slime line" at a fish packing plant in Ketchikan.
Anthony Doerr is the author of the story collections The Shell Collector (2002) and Memory Wall (2010), the memoir Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World (2007), and the novels About Grace (2004) and All the Light We Cannot See (2014), which was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Doerr’s short stories and essays have won four O. Henry Prizes and been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, New American Stories, The Best American Essays, The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, and lots of other places. His work has won the Barnes & Noble Booksellers “Discover Prize for Fiction”; the “Rome Prize” awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the New York Public Library’s “Young Lions Award”; a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship in writing; an Alex Award from the American Library Association; the National Magazine Award for Fiction; four Pushcart Prizes; two Pacific Northwest Book Awards; four Ohioana Book Awards; the 2010 Story Prize, which is considered the most prestigious prize in the U.S. for a collection of short stories; and the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, which is the largest prize in the world for a single short story. His books have twice been a New York Times Notable Book, an American Library Association Book of the Year, and made lots of other year end “Best Of” lists. In 2007, the British literary magazine Granta placed Doerr on its list of 21 Best Young American novelists.
If you’re interested in reading some of his work online, you can find a number of essays here, a story at Granta, and you can watch the actor Damian Lewis reading part of Doerr’s story “The Deep”.
Doerr is married with twin sons and has lived in Boise, Idaho since 2000.
Source: Anthony Doerr website and Simon and Schuster