Anthony Doerr is an American author whose novels and short stories emphasize the interconnectedness of our world while approaching themes ranging from love and nature to history and science. His style is characterized by lean, rhythmic sentences and distinctively short chapters.

Doerr is best known for his 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medal. Its narrative, set in WWII, follows the intertwined stories of two children: Marie-Laure, the blind daughter of a French locksmith, and Werner, a poor German orphan. Doerr described All the Light We Cannot See as a novel about, in essence, “the ways in which people, against all odds, try to be kind to one another.” His next novel was 2021’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, a finalist for the National Book Award. Building on the organizational structure Doerr employed in his previous novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land features five central characters flung across time and space—from the 1453 Ottoman siege of Constantinople to present-day Idaho to a spaceship plunging away from Earth—all linked by their connection to a fictional ancient Greek text. Doerr has described the “visceral pleasure” he derives from “taking these stories, these lives, and intersecting them, braiding them.” Art, he says, “is another way to try to exercise your imagination at connecting incongruous things”: “our myriad interconnections…with our ancestors, with our neighbors, with other species, with all the kids yet to be born.”

Doerr’s novels are clearly moralistic and, in spite of their often existential themes, they take a positive, sometimes sentimental view of humanity. This aspect has drawn both praise and criticism. Cloud Cuckoo Land is, for one critic, “humane and uplifting,” while for another it is “fraught with preachment,” “storytelling, redefined as esoteric manipulation…the novel is really a fable.” For his part, Doerr embraces the fable comparison (“I love fables! I don’t take that as a critique”). “I think for art to have any merit at all,” he once wrote, “it should remind the viewer/reader of the grandeur out there.”

Doerr was born on October 27, 1973, in Cleveland, Ohio, a place where, he later reflected, “to call yourself a writer would be [considered] precocious. Or pretentious.” His mother, a science teacher, introduced him to literature by reading stories (like The Chronicles of Narnia) to him out loud. (Her impact is also reflected in the presence of science as a throughline in much of Doerr’s work.) He majored in history at Bowdoin College, and indeed both of his major novels contain historical narratives grounded in meticulous research. Doerr went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts from Bowling Green State University; he has cited Anne Carson, Cormac McCarthy, and W.G. Sebald as literary inspirations. Equally important to Doerr’s work is his experience of travel. As a child, eager to venture beyond Ohio, he “always had maps on the walls.” Paraphrasing Tolstoy, Doerr has claimed that “art exists to wake you up…For me, travel and art are linked in that way. Leaving home exists as a way to wake you up as well, to see what you take for granted.” His stories and novels take place in a long list of countries, and he adapted his travel journals as the 2007 memoir Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World.

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