Jim Shepard

Jim Shepard is an acclaimed novelist, short story writer and memoirist who has attracted a wide and discerning readership through his unique blend of fiction and nonfiction. He is best known for his thoughtful and moving fiction and sharp eye for detail when writing about the past.

Born in 1956 to an American State Department official and an educator, Jim Shepard has lived a life that has taken him around the world, including travels to Europe, the Middle East and Russia, where his father served as a Foreign Service officer. Though perpetual itinerancy was hard for Shepard, his experiences living and moving between many different places have given him a breadth of cultural knowledge that has lent itself to a rich, varied career of writing.

Jim Shepard began writing seriously in the mid-1970s, a career that soon blossomed into short stories and essays, which he published in a variety of publications, including The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine and the Paris Review. During this period, he began to experiment with the interplay between fiction and nonfiction in his writing, increasingly blending the two in his works. In the mid-nineties, he began to focus more exclusively on fiction and has since produced a series of critically acclaimed novels and story collections.

Some of Shepard’s most successful novels include Project X (2004), a coming of age story focused on questions of morality and youthful ambition, and Like You’d Understand, Anyway (2007), a critically acclaimed collection of short stories set in various realms of fantasy, myth and memory over the past two hundred years.

In addition to his novels and story collections, Shepard has also written several memoirs, grounded in his own personal travels and experiences of displacement. Most recently, he published The Memorandum, a memoir set in Russia and its aftermath during Shepard's father's diplomatic service in the Soviet Union. The novel is a sensitive and poignant portrait of growing up in an exile culture, full of understated emotion, sharp eye for detail and lyrical prose.

In Jim Shepard's fiction and nonfiction, he consistently weaves past, present and future together in thoughtful, lyrical and often unexpected ways. His attention to detail, his unwavering commitment to historical accuracy, and his undisputed skill as a writer have earned him a deserved honor as one of the master wordsmiths of our time.

From his wide-ranging exploration of human experience drawn from real-life travels and his examination of timeless themes to his subtle commingling of history and memory, Jim Shepard's writing is a journey of the heart, mind and soul. For those wanting to explore these intellectual and emotional depths, his body of work is a treasure chest of joys and sorrows that accord with the complexity of life.