Audrey Niffenegger
When The Time Traveler's Wife was published in 2003, it became a bestseller, placing Audrey Niffenegger's name before a wide readership and marking a significant moment in her career as a novelist and writer. The book's reception brought attention to a writer who had already been developing her practice across several disciplines before that publication arrived.
Born on June 13, 1963, in South Haven, Niffenegger was educated at Northwestern University and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work encompasses multiple roles: she is a novelist, a science fiction writer, and a poet, as well as a visual artist and graphic artist. Alongside her writing and artistic practice, she has worked as a university teacher.
Niffenegger also wrote Her Fearful Symmetry, a further novel that extended her work in prose fiction. Writing in English, she has produced work across these various forms throughout her career. Her identity as a graphic artist and visual artist exists alongside her role as a writer, and both strands appear consistently in how she is described and categorized.
Her writing has been recognized with the Inkpot Award and the Exclusive Books Boeke Prize, two distinct honors that attest to the reach of her work. The bestseller status of The Time Traveler's Wife remains among the most concrete measures of the public response her fiction has received since its publication in 2003.
Quotes by Audrey Niffenegger
Audrey Niffenegger's insights on:
But you make me happy. It’s living up to being happy that’s the difficult part.
Sometimes I’m happy when he’s gone, but I’m always happy when he returns. -Clare.
The engagement ring is an emerald, and the dim light from the window is refracted green and white in it. The rings are silver, and they need cleaning. They need wearing, and I know just the girl to wear them.
Every minute of his life since then has been marked by her absence, every action has lacked dimension because she is not there to measure against. And when I was young I didn’t understand, but now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird.
Turning each page is like making a bed, an enormous expanse of paper slowly rises up and over.
Henry loves my hair almost as though it is a creature unto itself, as though it has a soul to call its own, as though it could love him back.
