“Because music is a language unto itself, when I'm writing, I need silence. I need to hear the music and the rhythms of the words inside my thoughts.” – Marianne Wiggins
Born into a Pennsylvania farm family on this date in 1947, Wiggins started writing in her teens but then married at age 17 and put her writing on hold for a decade while raising a young daughter. After several successful short stories she had her first (of seven) novels, Babe, published at age 28.
After divorcing her first husband, she moved to Europe, living in London for 16 years and for brief periods in Paris, Brussels and Rome. In 1988 she married novelist Salmon Rushdie and was in hiding with him for several years after the leader of Iran put out a death sentence against him. They divorced in 1993.
Among her many awards are a Whiting Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts award, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for her book John Dollar. And she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Evidence of Things Unseen. Also the author of several short story collections, she is a well-known speaker and longtime English professor at the University of Southern California.
“I take the world very personally,” she said of her writing. “I take history personally; I want to place myself in the larger context.”
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