The Penguin Speakers Bureau

Elizabeth Gilbert was born in Connecticut in 1969, and was raised on a small family Christmas tree farm. She went to college in New York City, spent the years after college traveling around the country and the world, and finally broke onto the literary scene in 1993, when her short story “Pilgrims” was selected, as an unsolicited manuscript, for publication in Esquire. The story ran under the headline “The Debut of an American Writer,” as indeed it was.

Since that time, Gilbert has published consistently and always to high praise. Her first book, a collection of short stories (PILGRIMS, Houghton-Mifflin, 1997) was said by Annie Proulx to be the work of “a young writer of incandescent talent.” That collection, which was a New York Times Notable Book, received the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Next came a bittersweet novel about lobster fishing territory wars off the coast of Maine (STERN MEN, Houghton-Mifflin, 2000), which was also a New York Times Notable Book and a great critical success. Her biography of an eclectic modern day woodsman (THE LAST AMERICAN MAN, Viking, 2002) received a nomination for the National Book Award in nonfiction.

Gilbert has also worked steadily as a journalist. Through much of the 1990s, she was on staff at SPIN magazine, where—with humor and pathos—she chronicled diverse individuals and subcultures, covering everything from Buckle Bunnies (the groupies of the professional rodeo circuit) to China’s headlong determination to construct the Three Gorges Dam. In 1999, Gilbert began working for GQ magazine, where her profiles of extraordinary and eccentric men (from singer Hank Williams III to quadriplegic athlete Jim MacLaren) earned her three National Magazine Award nominations for feature writing. She has also written for such varied publications as the New York Times Magazine (Yoga Y’all!), Allure, Real Simple, and Travel and Leisure. She has been a contributor to the public radio show This American Life (www.thislife.org). Much of her writing has been optioned by Hollywood for potential films; one GQ story, a memoir about Gilbert’s career as a bartender in a lowdown East Village dive (“The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon”) became the basis for the Disney movie Coyote Ugly. Her work has been translated into German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Danish, and EAT, PRAY, LOVE was simultaneously released in Great Britain in 2006, published by Bloomsbury Press.

Gilbert’s fourth and latest book, the New York Times bestselling EAT, PRAY, LOVE, is a memoir about the year she spent traveling around the world in search of personal restoration after a difficult divorce. Anne Lamott called EAT, PRAY, LOVE “wise, jaunty, human, ethereal, heartbreaking.”

She currently lives in New Jersey and is at work on a new novel.

Check out Elizabeth Gilbert’s website at www.elizabethgilbert.com.