Main content

Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler's career as a writer spans fifty years and twenty novels including Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist and 2015's A Spool of Blue Thread. She has won numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critic Circle Award. ±«Óătv Arts presents a selection of her interviews, and another chance to listen to Beginners Goodbye, first broadcast as a Book at Bedtime in May 2012.

  • While family and friends fuss around him, widower Aaron Woolcott ploughs on. He busies himself with work at the family firm, a small publisher with a successful line in 'Beginner's Guides' to every stage and aspect of life. At the point when Aaron thinks he can't go on, Dorothy, his wife, begins to appear to him in reassuringly solid form. Anne Tyler's moving and life-affirming story is read by William Hope.

From the archive

  • Anne Tyler gives an interview to Open Book in February 2015 for the release of A Spool of Blue Thread. Tyler talks about family dynamics, and why home life offers her consistently rich territory.

  • Anne Tyler discusses her favourite piece of art – Self Portrait by Charles R Savage. A photograph of a table set for Christmas which epitomises “that perfect moment just before everybody gets there”.

  • An adaptation of Anne Tyler's 1995 novel Ladder of Years, first broadcast in March 2015. When Delia Grinstead spontaneously walks out on her family, she leaves devastation in her wake.

  • World Book Club comes from Tyler's home in Baltimore in March 2015. She talks to Harriett Gilbert about her favourite of her novels, Dinner at the ±«Óătvsick Restaurant.

  • Mark Lawson talks to Anne Tyler at her home in Baltimore in March 2013, while she was in the middle of writing her twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread. Anne discusses her interests, influences, and her approach to writing.

Anne Tyler

About the author

The characters are the driving forces behind the stories in Anne Tyler’s novels.

Read more

She says: “I do make a point of writing down every imaginable facet of my characters before I begin a book, trying to get to know them so I can figure out how they’ll react in any situation".

“My reason for writing now is to live lives other than my own, and I do that by burrowing deeper and deeper… til I reach the center of those lives.”

Born in Minneapolis in 1941, Tyler grew up in North Carolina, moving to Maryland when she married. She began her first novel while working in the library at Duke University, where she had studied Russian literature. During this period she had short stories published in The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, and Harpers.

If Morning Ever Comes was released in 1964, and her second novel The Tin Can Tree followed just a year later. It was the publication of Tyler’s ninth book in 1982, Dinner at the ±«Óătvsick Restaurant that brought her national recognition in the United States.

John Updike wrote: “Her art needed only the darkening that would give her beautifully shaped sketches solidity… she has arrived at a new level of power.”

Dinner at the ±«Óătvsick Restaurant, which Tyler describes as her favourite book, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her next novel The Accidental Tourist was also nominated. It was later adapted into a film starring William Hurt, Kathleen Turner and Geena Davis. Tyler finally won the Pulitzer in 1988 with her eleventh book Breathing Lessons.

Tyler is a member of the American Academy of Art and Letters, and has lived for many years in Baltimore where her novels are set. Many anticipated her 2015 novel A Spool of Blue Thread to be her last, but she denies this.

Karen Holden, ±«Óătv Readings Unit

Author collection