Kathryn Davis

Of her work, Kathryn Davis has said, “I’m interested in the plight of a character embarked on a journey through an utterly unfamiliar (and frequently fantastic) landscape…. The quest itself has never interested me as much as the chance to describe that other world.”  In six extraordinary novels, Davis has bent and inventively explored the novel form itself.  She is an unconventional, challenging, and daring writer.

Davis lives in Vermont, has taught at Skidmore College, and was recently appointed senior fiction writer in the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. She is a recipient of the Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her novels are Labrador (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1988); The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf (Knopf, 1993); Hell; (Ecco, 1998) The Walking Tour (Houghton Miflin, 1999); Versailles (Houghton Miflin, 2002); The Thin Place (Little, Brown, 2006).