Karen Joy Fowler was born in Bloomington, Indiana, before moving to Palo Alto, California, at age 11. At the University of California she studied political science, receiving a master’s degree, then several years later enrolled in a creative writing course at the University’s Davis campus where she began publishing science fiction stories.

Fowler has written six novels and three short story collections which span different genres including historical fiction, science fiction, romantic comedy, and fantasy. Her first novel, Sarah Canary, published in 1991, received critical acclaim. Her 2004 novel The Jane Austen Book Club spent 13 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, and was adapted into a film in 2007. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is Fowler’s most recent novel, published in 2013. It won the Pen/Faulkner Award, the California Book Award for Fiction, was nominated for a Nebula Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Fowler’s father was a psychological professor who studied animal behaviour, a family tradition now being perpetuated by her daughter’s study of sea lion behaviour. After researching chimpanzees for the novel, Fowler wrote the short story What I Didn’t See after coming across a 1920 essay about an expedition carried out by the New York National Museum of History in which it was suggested that a woman in the group kill a gorilla to protect the species. The premise was that if a women could kill a gorilla (who were seen as dangerous but were actually gentle) then gorillas would no longer be feared and thus the thrill of hunting them would be removed.

Fowler and her husband live in Santa Cruz, California, and have two grown children and seven grandchildren.