Jennifer Donnelly

Early life

Donnelly was born in Port Chester, New York. Her paternal great-grandparents immigrated from Dublin, Ireland to New York state and settled in the Adirondack region where her grandmother worked at a hotel on Big Moose Lake, the setting for A Northern Light. Donnelly's own childhood was divided between the communities of Rye and Port Leyden, New York.

Donnelly attended the University of Rochester, majoring in English Literature and European History and graduating magna cum laude with distinction in English Literature. She also attended Birkbeck College, University of London, in England.

Career

Donnelly returned to New York at age 25, moving to Brooklyn. Her first book was published by Atheneum in 2002: Humble Pie, a picture book with the veteran illustrator Stephen Gammell. That year she also published her first novel, the product of ten years work. The Tea Rose (Thomas Dunne, 2002) is the first book of a trilogy set in the East End of London late in the 19th century, with ties to the story of Jack the Ripper. The second book, The Winter Rose, continues the tale, following the Finnegan family and related characters from London to Africa to the coast of Northern California. The third novel in the series, The Wild Rose, which explores Willa and Seamie's story, follows the characters from London on the verge of World War I to Arabia in 1918.

Her second novel, A Northern Light is Donnelly's biggest success to date. It is based on the infamous murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette in the Adirondack Mountains in 1906—which had been the basis for Theodore Dreiser's epic An American Tragedy and its adaptation, the 1951 film A Place in the Sun.

In 2004 A Northern Light won the Carnegie Medal for children's and young-adult books published in Britain—where it was entitled A Gathering Light and may have been her first work published in the U.K. In the U.S. it won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for young-adult literature and was a runner-up for the Printz Award from the American Library Association (ALA), recognizing the year's best book for young adults.

Her second young-adult novel, Revolution, is a tale of two teenage girls—one in present-day Brooklyn and one in Paris during the French Revolution—whose stories interweave as they struggle to make sense of the tragedies they encounter. The book was published in October, 2010 by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House, with a first run of 250,000 copies. The audiobook edition from Listening Library, read by Emily Janice Card and Emma Bering, was a runner-up for the ALA's annual Odyssey Award. Donnelly was "captivated and amazed" by the rendition of what she calls "the hardest book I've written".

In 2011, Donnelly, unhappy with the lack of a books category on Fox-TV's Teen Choice Awards, started Just Add Books on Facebook, in which she appealed to readers to write to Rupert Murdoch and request that a books category be added to the show. In 2012, the Teen Choice Awards added a books category. Fox has never acknowledged Donnelly or Just Add Books.

From 2014-2016, Donnelly published 4 books in her series the Waterfire Saga which have won countless awards. The books are Deep Blue, Rogue Wave, Dark Tide and Sea Spell.

Personal

Donnelly currently lives in New York's Hudson Valley with her husband, Doug and daughter, Daisy.

Awards and nominations

Donnelly won the Carnegie Medal and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for A Northern Light. Both A Northern Light and Revolution won other awards or were runners-up (often called Honor Books in the U.S.) and both were named to several annual book lists:

A Northern Light (2003)

Revolution (2010)

Works

As of July 2012, the U.S. Library of Congress catalogs six books by Donnelly, one 32-page picture book and five novels that surpass 2500 pages in sum.