Judith Thurman

Judith Thurman (b. 1946) is an American writer, biographer, and critic. She is the recipient of the 1983 National Book Award for nonfiction for her biography Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller. Her book Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette was a finalist for the 1999 nonfiction National Book Award. In 2016, she received the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

She is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine.

In 1967, Thurman graduated from Brandeis University with a Bachelor of Arts for her post-secondary education.

She began her literary career as a poet and translator. The Covent Garden Press, in London, published her first book of poems, Putting My Coat On, in 1972.

In the 1970s, Atheneum, in New York, published I Became Alone, a book of essays on women poets, for young people, and a volume of poetry for children, Flashlight, which has been regularly anthologized for more than forty years.

In 1973, Thurman returned to New York after five years in Europe and began to contribute to the newly launched Ms. magazine. Her essays introduced relatively unknown women writers to a new audience. They included the French poet Louise Labé and the Mexican poet Juana Inés de la Cruz. Thurman's translations of their work appeared in the Penguin Book of Women Poets. She also wrote about Gertrude Stein, Jean Rhys, Caryl Churchill, and Isak Dinesen, among others. Thurman worked at Brooklyn College as an adjunct professor from 1973 to 1975. For the remainder of …