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Biographical note
Annie Dillard was born in 1945 in Pennsylvania. She is a much-celebrated poet, novelist and essayist and author of thirteen books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was awarded the 2014 National Humanities Medal for her work deepening the understanding of the human experience. www.anniedillard.comWhat stays longest with the reader is the magnesium-flare intensity of her prose and her invincible joy at being alive
* New Statesman, 'Best Books of 2016' *
For Annie Dillard there's no realm of knowledge without its accompanying gasp of wonder; she has a mystic's appreciation of the glory and plurality of the world, and a gift for communicating astonishment . . . Dillard is triumphantly awake, and these essays are magnificent and dramatic, illuminating and inspirational. Read them; they brim with abundance
- GAVIN FRANCIS, * Guardian *
Luminous, startling, mischievous . . . the memory is scalpel bright, and the imagination alchemical
- RICHARD MABEY,
Annie Dillard is a brilliant American poet, novelist and essayist, a kind of philosophical nature writer in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir . . . [<i>The Abundance</i>] grips you with a real and painful sense of the natural world in all its mystery and cruelty
* Sunday Times *
Annie Dillard's books are like comets, like celestial events that remind us that the reality we inhabit is itself a celestial event
- MARILYNNE ROBINSON,
Spirited and gale-force. She raps out her opinions; lyrical, gleeful, cymbal-clashing, peppery. The best thing is her glee, a pied-piperish glee at being in the world, which she evokes better than anyone else
- ROBERT MACFARLANE,
Annie Dillard is among the greatest nature writers who have ever lived. Like Thoreau, like Gilbert White, she combines a naturalist's sharp eye with a philosopher's curiosity and a poet's magical gift for language. Keen, urgent and impassioned, her subject is life itself, in all its teeming and marvellous forms
- OLIVIA LAING,
Annie Dillard is one of those people who seem to be more fully alive than most of us, more nearly wide-awake than human beings generally get to be
* New York Times *
A writer who never seems tired, who has never plodded her way through a page or sentence, Dillard can only be enjoyed by a wide-awake reader . . .She opens our eyes to the world and to new ways of articulating what we see
- GEOFF DYER,
The trouble with hasty people like me is that we charge through our time on earth without noticing it. It was Annie Dillard who got me, before it was too late, to pay attention to where I was before I lost it. So I did. What abundance!
- RICHARD HOLLOWAY,