Penguin Speakers Bureau

Patricia McArdle worked overseas and in Washington, D.C., from 1979–2006 as a member of the U.S. diplomatic corps. Before joining the Department of State, she served for three years as one of the first two female Naval Officers at a remote U.S. communications base in Morocco. Prior to her military service, she spent two years as the only Peace Corps volunteer in a small village in central Paraguay. Her lifelong wanderlust was fueled by a self-funded journey through Europe, which she made with four college friends.

During that trip, and throughout her years of government service, she has kept detailed personal journals and has occasionally written short nonfiction pieces for publication. Her final Department of State posting in Northern Afghanistan as political advisor to a British military unit was the inspiration for her award-winning novel, Farishta. Although McArdle was required to submit her full manuscript to officials at the Department of State and to “related agencies” to be reviewed for classified materials, not a single word was changed or deleted by the reviewer.

The year McArdle spent patrolling northern Afghanistan with NATO soldiers opened her eyes to the severe shortage of cooking fuel faced by the 97 percent of Afghanistan’s population who live in rural areas and survive on subsistence farming. Moved by the sight of small children leaving their villages each day to search for wood for their mothers’ cooking fires, she decided to build and demonstrate simple solar-cooking devices which could be used every day for up to ten months each year to cook food and boil water in Afghanistan’s harsh but sunny climate. This passion for solar cooking, along with her concern for the lack of renewable energy and sustainable development in Afghanistan, inspired her to begin speaking, writing about, and demonstrating solar-cooking technology. She has been doing this on a volunteer basis since she retired from government service at the end of 2006.

In 2009, McArdle entered a short story, “The Roads are Closing” in the annual Foreign Service fiction contest. That piece, which was based on an incident that took place during her Peace Corps years, won first place and was published in the Foreign Service Journal. The following year, her novel, Farishta, won the Grand Prize for General Fiction in the 2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest.

McArdle was born in New York City while her father attended Columbia University on the G.I. Bill after WWII and her mother worked as a fashion model. She and her two younger brothers spent the next fourteen years living with their mother and her Marine Corps fighter pilot father on military bases around the country. They finally settled in southern California. McArdle attended college in New Mexico and received an MBA from Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona. She now lives in northern Virginia and continues to promote solar and other renewable energy technologies around the world. She is also mining her journals for her next novel.

Farishta Review
The Washington Post

"Solar Ovens, Renewable Energy Offer Hope for Afghanistan"
Reuters

"US Woman's Afghan Experience Inspires Novel"
Voice of America News

"Afghanistan’s Last Locavores"
The New York Times

"Farishta: Afghan Fiction From The Foreign Service"
NPR's Weekend Edition

"Farishta: A Compelling Novel About War & Rebuilding, Love & Loss"
The Huffington Post

Farishta Review
Kirkus Reviews

Farishta Review
Publishers Weekly