Laurie Viera Rigler

Laurie Viera Rigler's best-selling novels CONFESSIONS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT and RUDE AWAKENINGS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT (both published by Dutton and Plume in North America and by Bloomsbury in the UK) could have been considered semi-autobiographical had they not involved time travel and body switching. Her short story, INTOLERABLE STUPIDITY, in which Mr. Darcy brings charges against all the writers of Pride and Prejudice sequels, spin-offs and retellings, appears in the anthology JANE AUSTEN MADE ME DO IT (Ballantine). She is working on her next four novels. CONFESSIONS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT won a Publishers Weekly Listen Up Award, and RUDE AWAKENINGS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT was nominated for a Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice Award for Best Mainstream Fiction. CONFESSIONS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT was nominated for The Jane Austen Centre's (Bath, England) Jane Austen Award for Best New Fiction. Both Austen Addict novels have been published in France by Bragelonne and in Italy by Sperling & Kupfer, and CONFESSIONS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT has been published in the Netherlands (Archipel). Having spent several years writing her first novel and reading all those proclamations about how aspiring novelists were more likely to win the lottery than ever get published, Laurie is passionate about encouraging other writers. Prior to coming into her own as a novelist, she spent an exciting decade as a freelance book editor working with authors of fiction and nonfiction. She has also taught workshops in storytelling technique at Vroman's, Southern California's oldest and largest independent bookstore. A longtime resident of the very same Echo Park / Silverlake neighborhood in Los Angeles in which RUDE AWAKENINGS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT is set, Laurie now lives nearby in Pasadena, California, with her filmmaker husband. Her online home is at janeaustenaddict.com. "All this she must possess," added Darcy, "and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading." Well, if you must know, Laurie read the classics at the State University of New York at Buffalo and graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa.