Annie E. Proulx

Edna Annie Proulx was born in 1935 in Connecticut, USA. She lived in Vershire, Vermont for thirty years until 1994, when she permanently moved to Saratoga, Wyoming. For nineteen years, she wrote articles on a wide range of topics—weather, apples, canoes, cougars, cooking, libraries, African crafts, cider—and sold them to various magazines. In her spare time, she wrote short stories. In 1988, she published a collection of scattered short stories titled "Heart Songs and Other Tales." The success of this collection encouraged her publishers to urge her to write more. In 1992, her first novel, "Postcards," was released and was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award. "The Shipping News" was published in 1993. This novel received the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was translated into many languages with great success. In 2001, it was adapted into a film by the award-winning director Lasse Hallstrom ("My Life as a Dog"), starring Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, Judi Dench, and Cate Blanchett. Her subsequent books include: "Accordion Crimes" (1996), "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" (1999, a collection of short stories that included the award-winning stories "Brokeback Mountain" and "The Mud Below," first published in the New Yorker), "That Old Ace in the Hole" (2002), "Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2" (2004), and "Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3" (2008). In 2005, her short story "Brokeback Mountain," which explores the repression of homosexual desire in rural Wyoming, was adapted into a film by director Ang Lee, starring Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Anne Hathaway. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, two BAFTA Awards, Golden Globes, and three of the eight Oscars for which it was nominated (Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score). She has been married and divorced three times and has three sons and a daughter.