Tracy Chevalier

Tracy Chevalier was born on October 19, 1962 in Washington, D.C. She graduated from Oberlin College, a liberal arts college in Ohio, with a BA in English in 1984. After earning her B.A., she moved to the U.K., where she worked in the publishing industry for almost a decade before entering a master’s program in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She published her debut novel, The Virgin Blue, in 1997. Her second novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999), is also her most famous—it became a New York Times bestseller, receiving nominations for several literary awards. In 2003, it was adapted into a film starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth, and in 2008, it was adapted into a stage play. As of 2024, Chevalier has published 11 novels, including New Boy (2017), a retelling of William Shakespeare’s tragic play Othello (c. 1603) commissioned as part of the Hogarth Shakespeare Series, a project begun by Penguin Randon House in 2015 to reimagine Shakespeare plays in contemporary novel form. When Chevalier is not writing, she is involved in charitable and philanthropic work in the UK with organizations such as the Royal Literary Fund and First Story.