Background

Lynn Stegner was born on February 3, 1957, in Seattle, Washington, United States; the daughter of William G. Moultray and Betty R. Murphy. Lynn spent her earliest years in an orphanage.

Education

Lynn Stegner attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Menlo Park, and later the University of California, from which she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Literature.

Career

Lynn worked as a wine consultant and marketing representative in the California fine wine industry. Later, she and a colleague started their own company ‑ marketing, distributing, importing, and producing wine ‑ with offices in the Monterey and Santa Cruz area.

Stegner published her first novel in 1991 and sold her share of the wine company in order to be a full-time writer. Lynn authored five works of fiction, three of them novels ‑ Because a Fire Was in My Head, Undertow, and Fata Morgana ‑ and the novella triptych Pipers at the Gates of Dawn. Stegner wrote an extended critical introduction to her father-in-law’s short fiction, the Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner, as well as edited and wrote the foreword to a Penguin edition entitled Wallace Stegner: On Teaching and Writing Fiction. Her volume of stories entitled For All the Obvious Reasons was published in 2016.

Stegner has also taught writing at the University of California, the University of Vermont, the National University of Ireland-Galway, the Santa Fe Writers’ Workshop, and Stanford University, where she currently teaches for the Continuing Studies Program. Lynn is also an editor and literary consultant, with clients throughout the world. Her writings in support of conservation continue to accrue and include collaborations and publications with conservation biologists and paleontologists.

Achievements

• Lynn Stegner’s book Because a Fire Was in My Head won the Faulkner Award for Best Novel and was a Literary Ventures Selection, a BookSense Pick, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her other work Pipers at the Gates of Dawn received a Faulkner Society Gold Medal in the novella category. Among other honors, she got a Western States Arts Council fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship to Ireland, the Bridport Prize, and a Raymond Carver Short Story Award.

Works

More photos

• book

  • For All the Obvious Reasons

    (These nine distinctive tales explore the passions and emo...)

    2016
  • Because a Fire Was in My Head 2007
  • West of 98 2011
  • Pipers at the Gates of Dawn 2000
  • Fata Morgana 1995
  • Undertow 1993

Interests

• environmental matters, river running, wine, opera

Connections

In 1986 Lynn Marie Stegner married the novelist, historian, and essayist, Page Stegner, and two years later gave birth to the daughter Allison.

Father:

William G. Moultray

Mother:

Betty R. Murphy

Spouse:

Page Stegner

child:

Allison Stegner