Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis in 1941. She is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Breathing Lessons and other bestselling novels, including The Accidental Tourist, Ladder of Years, A Patchwork Planet and Back When We Were Grownups. In 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as ‘the greatest novelist writing in English’. She lives in Baltimore, where her novels are set.