Tara Westover

As of February 2020, Educated has spent two years in hardcover on the New York Times bestseller list and is being translated into more than 40 languages. The book was voted the #1 Library Reads pick by American librarians, and in August 2019 it was the most read book throughout all New York Public Library's 88 branches. As of March 2020, Educated has sold more than 4 million copies.

Westover was the Fall 2019 A.M. Rosenthal Writer in Residence at the Shorenstein Center. She continued her affiliation with the Center by becoming a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, based at the Shorenstein Center.

In 2018, Penguin Random House published Westover's Educated: A Memoir, which tells the story of her struggle to reconcile her desire for education and autonomy with her family's rigid ideology and isolated life. The coming-of-age story was a #1 New York Times bestseller, and was positively reviewed by the New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, USA Today, Vogue, and The Economist, among others.

In August 2018, former President Obama included Educated on his annual summer reading list, calling it "remarkable". In December, Amazon named Educated the "Best Book of 2018", and Bill Gates included it on a list of his favorite books of the year, saying, "It's even better than you've heard."

Tara Westover (born September 27–29, 1986) is an American memoirist, essayist and historian. Her memoir Educated (2018) debuted at #1 on The New York Times bestseller list and was a finalist for a number of national awards, including the LA Times Book Prize, PEN America's Jean Stein Book Award, and two awards from the National Book Critics Circle Award. The New York Times named Educated one of the 10 Best Books of 2018, and in a piece written by Bill Gates, Westover was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2019.

In 2009, while a graduate student at Cambridge, Westover told her parents that for many years (since age 15) she had been physically and psychologically abused by an older brother. Her parents responded by denying the violence and suggesting that Westover was under the influence of Satan, and a family schism occurred. The estrangement, and her unusual path to and through a university education, is the subject of her 2018 memoir, Educated.

As a teenager, Westover purchased textbooks and studied independently to pass the ACT Exam and gained admission to Brigham Young University despite not having a high school diploma. After a difficult first year, in which Westover struggled to adjust to academia and mainstream society, she began to adjust and went on to graduate with honors in 2008. She subsequently earned a Master's degree from the University of Cambridge at Trinity College as a Gates Cambridge Scholar, and was a visiting fellow at Harvard University in 2010. She returned to Trinity College, Cambridge, where she earned a doctorate in intellectual history in 2014. Her thesis is entitled "The Family, Morality and Social Science in Anglo-American Cooperative Thought, 1813–1890".