Suzanne Berne

Berne was born in Washington, D.C., the setting of her debut novel, and later taught creative writing as a Briggs-Copeland Fellow at Harvard, and afterward at Wellesley, Boston College, and the Rainier Writing Workshop.

A Crime in the Neighborhood (1997), narrated by a ten-year-old girl convinced her odd neighbor is responsible for a local murder during the summer Watergate dominated the news, was her debut novel; it won the Orange Prize in 1999, two years after publication.

Her later novels include A Perfect Arrangement, The Ghost at the Table, and The Dogs of Littlefield, along with the memoir-biography Missing Lucile, about the grandmother she never knew; she is now an affiliate scholar at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.