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Lynn Freed Professor of English

Ph.D. , Columbia University
M.A. , Columbia University
A.B. , University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Lynn Freed was born and grew up in Durban, South Africa. She came to New York as a graduate student in English Literature, and has taught Literature and Creative Writing at Bennington College in Vermont, St. Mary's College in Moraga, California, the University of California in Berkeley, the University of Oregon in Eugene, the University of Montana in Missoula and the University of Texas in Austin.

Professor Freed is the author of five novels, including House of Women, The Mirror, The Bungalow and Home Ground. A collection of her short fiction, The Curse of the Appropriate Man, was published in 2004 by Harcourt, and a collection of her essays, Reading, Writing, & Leaving Home: Life on the Page, was published by Harcourt in Fall, 2005, and in paperback in Fall, 2006. Reading, Writing & Leaving Home: Life On The Page is listed in the Times Literary Supplement “Best Books of the Year” for 2006. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Southwest Review, The Georgia Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Newsday, among others, and have been anthologised. Her work is widely translated.

In 2002, Professor Freed was awarded the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award for Fiction by The American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has won the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award for Fiction, and her short fiction has been recommended in Best American Short Stories and the O'Henry Awards: Prize Stories. Four of her novels and her collection of stories have appeared on The New York Times "Notable Books of the Year" list.

Professor Freed has been the recipient of fellowships, grants and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Guggenheim Foundation, The Camargo Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Lannan Foundation, and The Bogliasco Foundation, among others.

Publication Spotlight

Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home: Life on the Page by Lynn Freed In these eleven essays, Freed has produced a melange of memoir, meditation, revelation and instruction. Reflecting always on the complex relationship between fiction and life, she considers the writer's struggle to find the right voice, the right territory for her fiction; the role of the audience in creativity, the trials and rigors of earning a living as a writer, the differences between the story told and the story written, the relationship between reading and writing, the process of transmuting a troublesome mother from life onto the page, and the shock of a publication scandal at home. "Leaving home," she says, "is perhaps the central experience of the writer's life. The restless pursuit of a way back while remaining steadfastly at a distance-this is the enigma that informs the writer's perspective." Deeply learned, highly opinionated and always wickedly funny, Freed tears off all fictional disguises and exposes the human being behind the artist.

Publications:

• Reading, Writing & Leaving Home: Life on the Page (2005, Harcourt; 2006, Harvest paperback)
• The Curse of the Appropriate Man, (2004) Harcourt, Inc.
• House of Women (2002: Little, Brown & Co.; Back Bay Books, 2003; Flamingo, HarperCollins UK, 2002, 2003)
• The Mirror (1997: Crown Publishers; 1999: Ballantine Books; 1999 Flamingo, HarperCollins UK)
• The Bungalow (1993: Poseidon/Simon & Schuster; Fall, 1999: Story Line Press)
• Home Ground (William Heinemann Ltd., London; Summit Books/Simon & Schuster, 1986; Penguin, 1987; Penguin Books UK, 1988; Spring, 1999: Story Line Press)
• Heart Change (New American Library, 1982; republished as Friends of the Family, Spring 2000 by Story Line Press)
  
  To find out more, please visit www.lynnfreed.com

Email: lrfreed@ucdavis.edu