Marianne Wiggins

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Marianne Wiggins (1947-) is the author of seven novels and two collections of short stories. She is noted for the unusual characters and story lines in her novels. [[1]] Her work is increasingly considered exceptional.

[edit] Biography

Wiggins was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Her family was of Greek and Scots ancestry. Her father, a farmer, preached in a conservative Christian church founded by her grandfather. She married at 17, right after being graduated from Manheim Township High School and promptly gave birth to a daughter, Lara, whom she raised in Martha’s Vineyard. Lara is now a professional photographer in Los Angeles, and took the publicity photo shown above.

Wiggins lived in London for 16 years and for brief stints in Paris, Brussels and Rome. One night in London, she cooked a vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner for a group of friends, so they could learn about and enjoy the American tradition. Her literary agent brought along one of her male clients — a handsome Indian-born Englishman named Salman Rushdie.

She and Rushdie wed in January 1988. On a book tour in the US, the couple learned on Valentine's Day 1989 that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had ordered Rushdie killed for blasphemy in the book The Satanic Verses. She lived in 56 different safe houses, under the protection of the British government. After six months, however, she decided to take a flat under an assumed name. In 1993, the two divorced.

Her adventures since then have included chasing tornadoes in Nevada, exploring the Amazon Basin, and officiating a wedding in Oaxaca during Spring break, 2006. She doesn't intend to use any of it as the basis of her writing. “I have lived a really interesting life,” she told Pamela J. Johnson in July 2006. “I haven’t lived it so I can excavate material for my writing.” She added, “I’m a novelist. I don’t have those muscles. It’s not about me. It’s about what I’ve imagined. It’s the universal voice that I want to move forward. That’s my natural voice.”[2]

She currently lives in Los Angeles, California, where she has been in the English department of USC since fall, 2005.[3]

Wiggins won a Whiting Award in 1989. Ten authors annually win this award, currently $40,000, not for a specific work, but for exceptional talent and promise.

[edit] Books

• Babe, 1975, was the story of a single mother.
• Went South, 1980.
• Separate Checks, 1984, a short-story writer recovers from a nervous breakdown.

After this book was published, Wiggins was able to support herself and her daughter from her novels.

• Herself in Love and Other Stories, 1987
• John Dollar, 1989, Eight girls, marooned on an island.

Won the Janet Heidiger Kafka Prize for best novel written by an American woman.

• Bet They'll Miss Us when We're Gone: Stories, 1991
• Eveless Eden, 1995, the romance between a war correspondent and photographer.

Story suggested by then-husband Salman Rushdie.

Considered for "Orange Prize for Fiction" after her divorce.

• Almost Heaven, 1998
• Evidence of Things Unseen, 2003, the dawn of the atomic age is seen through the eyes of Fos, an amateur chemist in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and Opal, a glassblower's daughter.

2003 National Book Award nomination (fiction).

2004 Commonwealth Club Prize Gold Medal (Fiction)

Nominated for National Book Award

Nominated for Pulitzer Prize.