Same Sky (Ward)

Author Bio
• Birth—1972
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Raised—Rye, New York
• Education—B.A., William College; M.F.A., University of Montana
• Currently—lives in Austin, Texas


Amanda Eyre Ward was born in New York City in 1972. Her family moved to Rye, New York when she was four. Amanda attended Kent School in Kent, CT, where she wrote for the Kent News.

Amanda majored in English and American Studies at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She studied fiction writing with Jim Shepard and spent her junior fall in coastal Kenya. She worked part-time at the Williamstown Public Library. After graduation, Amanda taught at Athens College in Greece for a year, and then moved to Missoula, Montana.

Amanda studied fiction writing at the University of Montana with Bill Kittredge, Dierdre McNamer, Debra Earling, and Kevin Canty, receiving her MFA. After traveling to Egypt, she took a job at the University of Montana Mansfield Library, working in Inter Library Loan.

In 1998, Amanda moved to Austin, Texas where she began working on Sleep Toward Heaven. She wrote for the Austin Chronicle and worked for a variety of Internet startups. In 1999, Amanda won third prize in the Austin Chronicle short story contest with her story "Miss Montana’s Wedding Day."

She published Butte as in Beautiful that same year.

In July, 2000, Amanda married the geologist Tip Meckel in Ouray, Colorado.

They spent a summer in New Orleans, Louisiana, where Amanda wrote the short stories "The Beginning of the Wrong Novel" and "Classified."

During that summer, Amanda finished Sleep Toward Heaven, which was published in 2003. That novel won the Violet Crown Book Award and was optioned for film by Sandra Bullock and Fox Searchlight. To promote Sleep Toward Heaven, Amanda, her baby, and her mother Mary-Anne Westley traveled to London and Paris.

Amanda moved to Waterville, Maine, where she wrote in an attic filled with books. Her second novel, How to Be Lost, was published in 2004 and was selected as a Target Bookmarked pick. It has been published in fifteen countries.

After a year in Maine and two years on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Amanda and her family returned to Austin, Texas.

To research her third novel, Forgive Me, Amanda traveled with her sister, Liza Ward Bennigson, to Cape Town, South Africa. Forgive Me was published in 2007.

In 2009, she published her short story collection, Love Stories in This Town.

Close Your Eyes, Amanda's fourth novel, was published in 2011, receiving a four-star review in People Magazine and winning the Elle Lettres Readers' Prize for September. It inspired the Dallas Morning News to write, "With Close Your Eyes, Austin novelist Amanda Eyre Ward puts another jewel in her crown as the reigning doyenne of 'dark secrets' literary fiction."

Close Your Eyes was named in Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2011, and won the Elle Magazine Fiction Book of the Year.

Amanda's fifth novel, The Same Sky, was published in 2015. It was considered one of the most anticipated books for 2015 by BookPeople and named a "Book of the Week" by People Magazine. Dallas Morning News wrote, "Ward has written a novel that brilliantly attaches us to broader perspectives. It is a needed respite from the angry politics surrounding border issues that, instead of dividing us, connects us to our humanity."

Amanda currently writes every morning and spends afternoons with her children. (From the author's website.)