Barbara Quick
It took Barbara ten years and thirteen drafts to write her first novel, Northern Edge. The book won the Discover: Great New Writers Prize when it was published in cloth by Donald I. Fine in 1990. There were jacket quotes from Ursula LeGuin and Jessica Mitford. The novel was brought out in paperback by HarperCollinsWest in 1995 and optioned for a film in 2007. Barbara was a featured speaker shortly after the book’s publication at Literary Women: The Long Beach Festival of Authors. She became a frequent reviewer for the New York Times Book Review and had a MyTurn essay published in Newsweek (“Tales from the Self-Help Mill”) on August 31, 1992.
To properly do the research for her second novel, Vivaldi’s Virgins, Barbara studied Italian and made several trips to Venice, where she dug in the archives of the Ospedale della Pietà, the foundling home where Antonio Vivaldi was resident priest and composer. The novel was published in cloth by HarperCollins in July 2007, and launched as a paperback reprint in 2008. Translations of the novel were published in Holland, Spain, Russia, Israel, Greece, Brazil, Portugal, Estonia, Poland, Romania, Albania and Korea. Vivaldi’s Virgins was named one of the 10 best books of summer by Redbook, was included on Barnes and Nobles’ Summer List, chosen as a Notable Book for August by BookSense, was an Editor’s Choice for the Historical Novels Review, and was named the best novel of 2007 by the Monserrat Review. Still in print, the novel is a frequent book club choice and is featured on a number of school reading lists.
Barbara’s next project was a young adult novel set in 14th century Bologna, about the western world’s first female anatomist, Alessandra Giliani. A Golden Web, acquired by Rosemary Brosnan, was published by HarperTeen in 2010 and translated into Indonesian.
Barbara’s reviews, essays and articles have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Newsweek, Ms., the Los Angeles Times, People, Yahoo and the San Francisco Chronicle. She has been interviewed on numerous radio programs, including WNYC’s Soundcheck and KQED’s Forum.