Alice Sebold

In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Sebold said, "I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it's not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who've experienced it from those who haven't. Though it's a horrible experience, it's not as if violence hasn't affected many of us." The Lovely Bones remained on The New York Times Bestseller list for over one year and was adapted into a 2010 film of the same name by Peter Jackson.

Sebold also guest-edited The Best American Short Stories 2009. The process required her to read over 200 submitted short stories and to choose 20 for inclusion in the anthology.

Sebold won the American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award for Adult Fiction in 2003 The Lovely Bones and the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel in 2002. Sebold is an alumna of the Ragdale Foundation.

Sebold left New York for Southern California, where she became a caretaker of an artists' colony, earning $386 a month and living in a cabin in the woods without electricity. She ultimately obtained an MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 1998.

After graduating from Syracuse in 1984, Sebold briefly attended the University of Houston in Texas, for graduate school, then moved to Manhattan for the next 10 years. She held several waitressing jobs while pursuing a writing career, but neither her poetry nor her attempts at writing a novel came to fruition. She also began using heroin recreationally. Sebold recounted her substance abuse to students at an Evening of Fiction workshop by saying: "I did a lot of things that I am not particularly proud of and that I can’t believe that I did."

In the early hours of May 8, 1981, while a freshman at Syracuse University, she was raped while walking home through a park off campus. She reported the crime to the police, who took her statement and investigated, but could not identify any suspects.

Sebold returned home to Pennsylvania for the summer before returning to Syracuse to finish her bachelor's degree and study writing. On October 5, 1981, while walking down a street near the Syracuse campus, she recognized her rapist. She notified police and testified against the rapist in court; he was convicted of rape and sodomy, and sentenced to eight to 25 years. Her attacker is out of prison now, but Sebold says she has not kept track of his whereabouts.

Sebold was born in Madison, Wisconsin. She grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where her father taught Spanish at the University of Pennsylvania. Sebold graduated from Great Valley High School in Malvern, Pennsylvania, in 1980.

Alice Sebold (born September 6, 1963) is an American writer. She has published three books: Lucky (1999), The Lovely Bones (2002), and The Almost Moon (2007).