Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1973. He studied history at Bowdoin College and later completed an MFA at Bowling Green State University. His early career was built through short fiction, essays and residencies, and his first collection, The Shell Collector, demonstrated the precise observation of nature and science that would remain characteristic of his writing. He followed it with the novel About Grace and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome.

Doerr reached a much wider readership with All the Light We Cannot See, a Second World War novel following a blind French girl and a technically gifted German boy whose lives converge in occupied Saint-Malo. The novel won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and is notable for its short chapters, shifting viewpoints and use of radio, engineering and natural history as recurring motifs. Cloud Cuckoo Land expands his historical range by linking characters in fifteenth-century Constantinople, the modern United States and a future spacecraft through the survival of an ancient text. Across these works, Doerr examines memory, transmission, moral choice and the fragile ways knowledge survives war and displacement.