Audrey Niffenegger (born June 13, 1963) is an American writer, artist, and academic. Her debut novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, published in 2003, was a bestseller.
Biography
Audrey Niffenegger was born in 1963 in South Haven, Michigan. At the age of two,[2] she and her family moved to Evanston, Illinois, and she has since spent the majority of her life living in or close to Chicago.[3] Niffenegger started writing books when she was six years old. Niffenegger completed her undergraduate degree at the Art Institute of Chicago where she worked on becoming a visual artist.[3] After completing her undergraduate degree, she got her M.F.A at Northwestern University.[4] From 1994 to 2015, Niffenegger served on the faculty of the Creative Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago, where she co-founded the Columbia College Chicago Center for the Book and Paper Arts.[5]
Niffenegger is also the founding member of T3 or Text 3, an artist and writer's group which performs and exhibits in Chicago. She is an alumna and board member of the Ragdale Foundation. She started making books herself by using processes such as intaglio and letterpress. She also wrote many novels which were produced on an offset press.[6]
She founded Artists Book House.[7] In 2024, Niffenegger announced that the center's home would be built in the Old Irving Park neighborhood.[8]
Novels
Niffenegger's debut novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, was published in 2003 and was a bestseller.[9] A film adaptation was released in 2009. Niffenegger has no intention of watching the movie because she stated that the characters are only truly hers in the book, not in the movie.[10] Niffenegger originally conceptualized The Time Traveler's Wife as a graphic novel but realized that the time travel would be difficult to capture in visualizations.[11] In March 2009, Niffenegger sold her second novel, a literary ghost story called Her Fearful Symmetry, to Charles Scribner's Sons for an advance of $5 million.[12] The book was released on October 1, 2009[13] and is set in London's Highgate Cemetery where, during research for the book, Niffenegger acted as a tour guide.[14] Though not as huge a commercial juggernaut as The Time Traveler's Wife, this book generally garnered more positive critical reviews and cinched Niffenegger's reputation as a leading novelist of ideas and atmosphere.[15]
Niffenegger collaborated with Wayne McGregor on a balletic fable, Raven Girl (2013), performed at the Royal Opera House in London in 2013, 2015.[16]
In 2009, she started working on a novel called The Chinchilla Girl in Exile.[17]
In 2013, it was announced that there would be a sequel to The Time Traveler's Wife[18] and in 2022 it was announced that title is The Other Husband set to be released in 2023.[18][19][20]
Visual books
Niffenegger has degrees from the Art Institute of Chicago and Northwestern University.[5] As an undergraduate student at the Art Institute of Chicago, Niffenegger created her own book arts major combining etching, letterpress arts and bookbinding.[4] Her first project was called The Adventuress, which she self-described as "a novel in pictures". Niffenegger's second novel in pictures was titled The Three Incestuous Sisters which she created while completing her M.F.A. at Northwestern.[5] These two novels in pictures were subsequently published by Harry N. Abrams. The Three Incestuous Sisters was published in 2005 and tells the story of three unusual sisters who live in a seaside house; the book has been compared to the work of Edward Gorey. The Adventuress was released on September 1, 2006.
The 2004 short story "The Night Bookmobile" was serialized in 2008 in "Visual Novel" format in The Guardian.[21] "The Night Bookmobile" was published on October 1, 2010, by Jonathan Cape. Niffenegger intends "The Night Bookmobile" to be the first installment in a series titled "The Library". She is working on the second installment, called "Moths of the New World", about a stolen book.[22]
Personal life
Niffenegger is married to cartoonist Eddie Campbell. Niffenegger and Campbell collaborated on the visual novel Bizarre Romance to celebrate the Comics Unmasked exhibit at the British Library.[23] Niffenegger describes herself as "somewhere in the spectrum of agnosticism and atheism" and ascribes her disbelief to her Catholic background.[24]
Awake in the Dream World: The Art of Audrey Niffenegger (2013), with Susan Fisher Sterling and Mark Pascale
Anthologies
Ghostly: A Collection of Ghost Stories (Scribner, 2015). ISBN9781501111198. An anthology selected and illustrated by Audrey Niffenegger. She also wrote the introduction.
Books Foreworded by Niffenegger
The Art of Neil Gaiman (with Hayley Campbell, Neil Gaiman)
Classic Penguin: Cover to Cover ( Paul Buckley)
Mr. Wrong: Real-Life Stories about the Men We Used to Love (Jacquelyn Mitchard, Harriet Brown, et al.)
^Wassserman, Krystyna (2011). The Book as Art; Artists's Books from the National Museum of Women in the Arts. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. p. 12. ISBN978-1-56898-992-1.
^"Our Mission". Artists Book House. Retrieved July 6, 2024.
^Rich, Motoko (March 11, 2009). "Audrey Niffenegger Receives $5 Million Advance for Second Novel". The New York Times. pp. C2. Retrieved July 9, 2013. Six years after the publication of her best-selling novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger sold a new manuscript for almost $5 million, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations. It is an especially significant sum at a time of retrenchment and economic uncertainty in the publishing world. After a fiercely contested auction, Scribner, a unit of Simon & Schuster, bought the rights to publish the new novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, in the United States this fall.
^Audrey Niffenegger. "Official Website FAQs". Archived from the original on May 7, 2013. Retrieved 29 March 2015. What are you writing now? I have started to work on a novel called The Chinchilla Girl in Exile. It is about a nine-year-old girl named Lizzie Varo who has hypertrichosis (she is covered with hair) and her desire to go to school (she's been home-schooled by her clever and amusing Aunt Mariella) and what happens when she does go to school (things get weird).
Interview with Writer Unboxed 3/06 about craft, the process of writing and editing, Time Traveler's Wife, The Three Incestuous Sisters, Her Fearful Symmetry, more.
Two-part interview conducted by Henk de Berg (2019) on Niffenegger's career, "The Time Traveler's Wife" and its sequel, "The Other Husband": part 1part 2
