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Tracy Chevalier was born in Washington, DC but has lived in England all her adult life. She now has dual citizenship. She has a BA in English from Oberlin College, Ohio and an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England. She lives in London with her English husband and son. Before turning to writing full-time, she was a reference book editor for several years. She has written 7 novels. Her second novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, won the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, sold 4 million copies worldwide, and was made into a film starring Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson.
Tracy Chevalier's website
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Everyday life in 17th century Delft is so vivid in Girl with a Pearl
Earring. How did you conduct your research? Where?
Most of it, I confess, was done in my armchair. I read a lot (especially
Simon Schama's The Embarrassment Of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture
in The Golden Age) and looked at a lot of paintings. Luckily 17th-century Dutch
paintings are mainly scenes from everyday life and so it was easy to see what
houses looked like inside and how they were run. I also went to Delft for four
days and just wandered around, taking it in. Vermeer's house no longer exists,
but there are plenty of 17th-century buildings still left, as well as the Market
Square, the Meat Hall, the canals and bridges. It's not hard to get an idea of
what it was like then.
Little is known of Vermeer's life—at least compared with other Baroque
painters like Rembrandt. Why did you choose Vermeer's work to write about?
I chose Vermeer's work because it is so beautiful and so mysterious. In his
paintings, the solitary women going about their domestic tasks—pouring milk,
reading letters, weighing gold, putting on a necklace—inhabit a world that we
are getting a secret glimpse at. And because it...
Novelist, biographer, and poet Peter Ackroyd was born in London on October 5, 1949.
He graduated from Clare College, Cambridge, and studied at Yale University as a Mellon Fellow, where he completed Notes for a New Culture: ...
(more)
If you enjoyed:
Remarkable Creatures
Try:
The Lambs of London
by Peter Ackroyd
Chloe Aridjis is a Mexican–American writer who was born in New York and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico. After completing her Ph.D. at the University of Oxford in nineteenth–century French poetry and magic ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Girl With A Pearl Earring
Try:
Asunder
by Chloe Aridjis
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