Madison Smartt Bell

Madison Smartt Bell was born in 1957 in Tennessee and raised there. He graduated from Princeton University and Hollins College and published his first novel, The Washington Square Ensemble, when he was twenty-five. He has since published eleven novels and two collections of stories and has contributed fiction and reviews to many anthologies, newspapers and magazines, including Harper’s and the New York Times. In 1996 he was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. His story from that issue, ‘Looking for the General’, is taken from the second novel in a trilogy about the Haitian slave revolution of 1791. The first book in the sequence, All Souls’ Rising, published by Pantheon in the United States and Granta Books in the UK, was a finalist for the 1995 National Book and PEN/Faulkner awards. Married to the poet Elizabeth Spires, he is currently teaches at Goucher College, Maryland. They live in Baltimore with their daughter. Madison Smartt Bell has since published eleven novels and two collections of stories and has contributed fiction and reviews to many anthologies, newspapers and magazines, including Harper’s and the New York Times.