Katharine Weber

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Katharine Weber (born 1955) is an American novelist.

Weber was born in New York City. She grew up in the Forest Hills Gardens section of Queens, New York. She attended The Kew-Forest School and Forest Hills High School before attending the Freshman Year Program at The New School for Social Research (now Eugene Lang College at New School University) in 1972. Weber attended Yale as a part-time undergraduate from 1982 to 1984. She was not graduated from high school or college.

In 1976, she married Nicholas Fox Weber and moved to Connecticut. Two daughters, Lucy and Charlotte, were born in 1981 and 1983. Weber's maternal grandmother was the songwriter Kay Swift. Since Swift's death in 1993, Weber has been a Trustee and the Administrator of the Kay Swift Memorial Trust. In 2004 she was artistic advisor for a restoration recording project with the non-profit label PS Classics that resulted in the release of a CD of the complete score, with Broadway performers and an orchestra conducted by Aaron Gandy, of the 1930 hit Broadway musical Fine and Dandy.

[edit] Writing career

Her fiction debut in print, the short story "Friend of the Family", appeared in The New Yorker in January 1993. Her short fiction has also appeared in Story, Redbook, Southwest Review, Gargoyle, The Connecticut Review, the Vestal Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her short story "Sleeping", which appeared originally in Vestal Review and has been anthologized several times, is being made into a short dramatic film by Group-Six Productions. Her first novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, was published in 1995. She was named by Granta to the controversial list of 50 Best Young American Novelists in 1996. Her second novel, The Music Lesson, was published in 1999 and has since been translated into thirteen foreign languages. Her third novel, The Little Women, a Finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize, was published 2003. All three novels have been named Notable Books by The New York Times Book Review. Her fourth novel, Triangle, which is about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, was published in 2006, won the 2007 Connecticut Book Award for Fiction, and was a Finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize and the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Triangle was also longlisted for the 2008 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her literary essays have appeared in numerous recent anthologies. She is under contract with Harmony/Shaye Areheart Books for her next novel, Temper, and a memoir, Symptoms of Fiction.

She was elected to a term on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, serving from 2001 to 2003.

She has written book reviews, essays, and columns for several publications, including the New Haven Register, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, the Boston Globe, Washington Post Bookworld, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, The London Review of Books, Vogue, and The New Leader.

She has taught fiction writing at Yale University, Goucher College, the Paris Writers Workshop, and elsewhere, and is currently a graduate thesis advisor in the writing program at the School of the Arts at Columbia University.