Alice Sebold

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**Alice Sebold**
Born:	September 6, 1963 Madison, Wisconsin, Wisconsin
Occupation(s):
Nationality:	USA
Writing period:	early 21st century
Genre(s):	literary fiction

Alice Sebold was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1963. She grew up wanting to be a famous novelist. After graduating from high school, Alice Sebold enrolled in Syracuse University in 1980. She has currently published two books, Lucky and The Lovely Bones. Alice writes about her own personal experiences in her novels.

When Alice Sebold was 18 years old and a freshman at Syracuse, she was attacked, beaten and brutally raped in a nearby park. After the incident, Sebold went back to her dorm where a security guard called an ambulance. After some months at home Sebold returned to Syracuse to finish her bachelor’s degree and study writing. While walking down a street near the Syracuse campus, she recognized her rapist and managed to secure his arrest. After graduating from Syracuse, Sebold went to Texas for graduate school. After spending time in Texas, Sebold moved to Manhattan and lived there for 10 years. She held several jobs as a waitress and tried to pursue her writing career [1]. Sebold wanted to write her story through poetry, but that and attempts at writing a novel, did not come to fruition. For some time Sebold tried to deal with her memories of the attack through drugs. She used heroin recreationally for two years, though claims she never became addicted, not having an addictive personality. [2]. Sebold recounted her drug abuse to students at an Evening of Fiction workshop by saying that, "I did a lot of things that I am not particularly proud of and that I can’t believe that I did" [3].

Sebold left the city and moved to Southern California, where she became a caretaker of an arts colony, earning $386 a month and living in a cabin in the woods without electricity. She would write by propane candlelight. Later, Sebold applied to graduate school at University of California, Irvine in 1995. While at UCI Sebold began writing Lucky, a memoir of her rape while at Syracuse. She named the book from a police officer who told Sebold that she was lucky for not being killed because a girl was raped and killed in the same place she was attacked. The story began while writing a ten-page assignment for class, though Sebold eventually wrote 40 pages. The book arose from that assignment.

After publishing Lucky in 1999, Sebold continued her writing career. She published a novel called The Lovely Bones in 2002. Auckland Writers and Readers Festival say that Sebold’s novel, The Lovely Bones is a "number one bestseller celebrated at once for its artistry, its luminous clarity of emotion and its astonishing power to lay claim to the hearts of millions of readers around the world" [4]. The Lovely Bones is a story of a 14-year-old girl who is raped and killed. She tells her story from heaven looking down as her family tries to cope with the death of their oldest daughter. While working on Lovely Bones Sebold met her husband Glen David Gold at UCI in 1995. He arrived to one of his classes late and he could not remove his motor cycle helmet. Sebold began talking with Glen Gold and they were married in November of 2001 [5].

Alice Sebold tells Publisher Weekly, I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it’s not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who’ve experienced it from those who haven’t. Though it’s a horrible experience, it’s not as if violence hasn’t affected many of us [6].

Film director Peter Jackson is presently slated to make The Lovely Bones into a movie [7]. Alice Sebold won for her novel The Lovely Bones the American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award in Adult Fiction 2003 [8] and the Bram Stoker Award in First Novel 2002 of the Horror Writers Association and was also nominated in the Novel category in that year [9].

[edit] Books

The Lovely Bones Novel by Alice Sebold (Little, Brown; 1st ed edition, June 1, 2002) ISBN 0-316-66634-3, (Back Bay Books, April 20, 2004) ISBN 0-316-16881-5
Lucky Memoir by Alice Sebold (Back Bay Books, September 1, 2002) ISBN 0-316-66634-3, ISBN 0-316-09619-9
The Secret Garden (Modern Library Classics) by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Alice Sebold (Introduction) (Modern Library November 11, 2003) ISBN 0-8129-6998-7