Audrey Niffenegger - Book Browse

Biography

Audrey Niffenegger is a writer and visual artist who lives in Chicago. She is a full time professor in the Interdisciplinary Book Arts MFA Program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, where she teaches writing, letterpress printing, and fine edition book production. Her amusements include collecting taxidermy and reading comic books. Miss Niffenegger spent her youth hiding in her bedroom and painting her fingernails black while listening to Patti Smith and Gang of Four, but she is feeling better now, thanks.

The Time Traveler's Wife is her first novel.

In her own words:

"I'm 39 years old, and I grew up in Evanston, Illinois, which is the first suburb north of Chicago. I'm a spinster (albeit a spinster with a permanent boyfriend) and I live in a white stucco bungalow with my cats, Muybridge and Claudine. I've been writing since I was a tiny child, and I always made pictures to go with the words.

I have received lots of help from Ragdale Foundation; I have been a Ragdale Fellow nine times. The Time Traveler's Wife was also supported by the Illinois Arts Council, which gave me a Fellowship in Prose in 2000. I got my MFA from Northwestern University in 1991, and my BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1985."

My writing has been published in Bust, The Magnetic Poetry Book of Poetry, and Electronic Book Review. My art is in the collections of the Newberry Library, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Library of Congress, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and Temple University, among others.

I wanted to write a book about waiting.

The Time Traveler's Wife is dedicated to my maternal grandparents, Elizabeth and Norbert Tamandl. My grandfather died very young, and very suddenly, of a brain tumor. I never met him. My grandmother never remarried. By all accounts, my grandparents were very happy together. My grandmother outlived her husband by almost thirty years.

I wanted to write about a perfect marriage that is tested by something outside the control of the couple. The title came to me out of the blue, and from the title sprang the characters, and from the characters came the story.

Previous Publications and Awards

Visual Books

Short Stories / Illustrations

Honors, Citations and Prizes

This biography was last updated on 09/01/2003. Unless otherwise stated, it was provided by the author's publisher or publicist.

Back to AudreyNiffenegger