Marianne Wiggins

Marianne Wiggins (born September 8, 1947) is an award-winning American author. She is noted for the unusual characters and storylines in her novels. According to The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English, Wiggins writes with "a bold intelligence and an ear for hidden comedy." She has won a Whiting Award, an NEA award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2004 for her novel Evidence of Things Unseen.

Wiggins was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Her family was of Greek and Scots ancestry. Her father, a farmer, preached in a conservative Christian church founded by her grandfather. She married at 17, just after graduating from Manheim Township High School, and gave birth to a daughter, Lara, whom she raised in Martha's Vineyard. Lara is now a renowned photographer in Los Angeles.

“I have lived a really interesting life,” she told Pamela J. Johnson in July 2006. “I haven’t lived it so I can excavate material for my writing.” She added, “I’m a novelist. I don’t have those muscles. It’s not about me. It’s about what I’ve imagined. It’s the universal voice that I want to move forward. That’s my natural voice.”

Wiggins lived in London for 16 years, and for brief periods in Paris, Brussels and Rome.

In January 1988, she married the novelist Salman Rushdie in London. On February 14, 1989—Valentine's Day—the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a Fatwa ordering Rushdie's assassination for alleged blasphemy in his book, The Satanic Verses. Although Wiggins had told Rushdie only five days prior that she wished to end their marriage, she nevertheless went into hiding along with him. In 1993, the two divorced.

Wiggins currently lives in Los Angeles, California, where she has been in the English department of the University of Southern California since 2005.

• 1989 Whiting Award
• 1989 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for John Dollar
• 2003 Finalist for the National Book Award for Evidence of Things Unseen

• National Book Award page