Kim Edwards was born in Killeen, Texas. She grew up in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York and attended Colgate University and The University of Iowa, where she earned an MFA in fiction and an MA in linguistics. She is the author of The Secrets of a Fire King, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her stories have been published inThe Paris Review, Story, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, and many other periodicals. She has received many awards for the short story, including a Pushcart Prize, the National Magazine Award, the Nelson Algren Award, and inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of 1993. Two of her stories were performed at Symphony Space and broadcast on ‘Selected Shorts.’ Kim Edwards received a Whiting Writers’ Award, as well as grants from the Pennsylvania and Kentucky Arts Councils, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, her first novel, was a Barnes and Noble Discover Award pick and became a word-of-mouth best-seller, spending 122 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, 20 of those weeks at #1. Published in more than 32 countries, it was also a best seller in Italy, France, Germany, England, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Holland, and Taiwan. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter won the Kentucky Literary Award and the British Book Award, and was chosen as Book of the Year for 2006 by USA Today. Her new novel, The Lake of Dreams, an Independent Booksellers pick, has already been published in sixteen countries and has been a best seller in the USA, Canada, Australia, Italy, Brazil, and India.
