Marie Arana

Marie Arana was born in Peru, the daughter of Jorge Arana Cisneros, a Peruvian born civil engineer, and Marie Elverine Clapp Campbell, an American from Kansas and Boston, whose family has deep roots in United States. She moved with her parents to Summit, New Jersey (United States) at the age of 9. She later achieved her B.A. in Russian at Northwestern University, her M.A. in linguistics at Hong Kong University, a certificate of scholarship at Yale University in China, and began her career in book publishing, where she was vice president and senior editor at Harcourt Brace and Simon & Schuster. At Northwestern she joined Delta Gamma and was honored as Homecoming Queen.

For more than a decade she was the editor in chief of "Book World", the book review section of The Washington Post, during which time she instituted the partnership of The Washington Post with the White House (First Lady Laura Bush) and the Library of Congress (Dr. James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress) in hosting the annual National Book Festival on the Washington Mall. She is currently the Literary Director of the Library of Congress and directs all programming for the National Book Festival among numerous other programs at the Library.[2] Arana is a Writer at Large for The Washington Post. She is married to Jonathan Yardley, the Post's former chief book critic, and has two children from a previous marriage, Lalo Walsh and Adam Ward; as well as two stepchildren, Jim Yardley and Bill Yardley.

Marie Arana is the author of a memoir about a bicultural childhood American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood (finalist for the 2001 National Book Award as well as the Martha PEN/Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir); editor of a collection of Washington Post essays about the writer's craft, The Writing Life (2002); and the author of Cellophane (a satirical novel set in the Peruvian Amazon, published in 2006, and a finalist for the John Sargent Prize). Her most recent novel, published in January 2009, is Lima Nights (its Spanish edition [2013] was selected by El Comercio's chief book critic as one of the best five novels of 2013 in Peru. In April, 2013, Simon & Schuster published her book "Bolívar: American Liberator," a biography of the South American revolutionary leader and founder Simon Bolivar[3] [4][5] It won the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography.[6] She has written introductions for many books, among them a National Geographic book of aerial photographs of South America, Through the Eyes of the Condor. and she is a frequent spokesperson on Hispanic issues, Latin America, and the book industry.

Arana has served on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. She is currently on the board of directors of the American Writers Museum. For many years, she has directed literary events for the Americartes Festivals at the Kennedy Center. She has been a judge for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award as well as for the National Book Critics Circle. Her commentary has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the "Virginia Quarterly Review," USA Today, Civilization, Smithsonian magazine, National Geographic, and numerous other literary publications throughout the Americas.

Arana was a Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in 1996 and then again in 1999, an Invited Research Scholar at Brown University in 2008–2009. In October 2009, Arana received the Alumna Award of the Year at Northwestern University.[7]

In April 2009, Arana was named John W. Kluge Distinguished Scholar at the Library of Congress through 2010. In September 2009, she was elected to the Scholars' Council of the Library of Congress as well as the Board of Directors of the National Book Festival.

Arana was scriptwriter for the Latin American portion of the film "Girl Rising," which describes the life of Senna, a 14-year-old girl in the Andean gold-mining town of La Rinconada. At 17,000 feet above sea level, it is the highest human habitation in the world. The film was part of a campaign to promote the importance of girls' education. Arana's writing about that experience, which was published in The Best American Travel Writing 2013, was named one of "the most gripping and sobering" of the year.

In March 2015, Arana directed the Iberian Suite Festival Literary Series for the Kennedy Center. In the course of seven programs, she featured more than two dozen Spanish-language and Portuguese-language writers from around the world.

In October 2015, Arana was named Chair of the Cultures of the Countries of the South, an honorary post at the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress. She then became Literary Advisor to the Librarian of Congress as well as Director of the National Book Festival.

In 2019, Simon & Schuster published her latest book, Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story (Orion Publishers released it in the United Kingdom). The Spanish edition of Bolívar: Libertador Americano was published the same year by Penguin Random House.

In October 2019, Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress, named her Literary Director of the Library of Congress.

Bolivar and Silver, Sword and Stone have received accusations of hispanophobia, antiespañolismo, stereotyping, sectarianism and misinformation.[8][9][10]

In May 2020, Arana was awarded the 2020 Arts and Literature Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which cited her accumulated work as “vivid and elegantly argued writing about Latin America . . . that shows us the dire effects of countries that have not ceased to be colonized for hundreds of years. Arana’s treatment of these sustained attacks is compelling and undeniable.”[11]

• American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood. The Dial Press. 2001. ISBN 0-385-31962-2. – a memoir about a bicultural childhood; finalist for the 2001 National Book Award
• The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work: A Collection from the Washington Post Book World, editor, PublicAffairs, 2002, ISBN 9781586481490
• Cellophane. The Dial Press. 2006. ISBN 0-385-33664-0. Marie Arana. – a satirical novel set in the Peruvian Amazon; finalist for the John Sargent Prize[12]
• Lima Nights. The Dial Press. 2009. ISBN 9780385342599. Marie Arana. – a love story set in contemporary Peru
• "Introduction by Marie Arana". Through the Eyes of the Condor. Robert B. Haas (photographer). National Geographic. 2007. ISBN 9781426201325.CS1 maint: others (link)[13]
• Stone Offerings: Machu Picchu's Terraces of Enlightenment, photographs by Mike Torrey, Introduction by Marie Arana, Lightpoint, 2009, Winner of the 2010 Benjamin Franklin Award, Best Art Book of the Year
• Bolivar: American Liberator, Simon & Schuster, 2013, ISBN 9781439110195 – winner of the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Award in biography.
• Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story, Simon & Schuster, 2019, ISBN 9781501104244

• May WIW Conference Features Washington Post ‘Book World’ Editor Marie Arana, Washington Writer Volume 28, No. 4, April 2003 (Google cached HTML version at the Wayback Machine (archived July 2, 2003))
• Marie Arana at Random House
• Contemporary Authors (Biography - Arana, Marie), Thomson Gale, 2006
• Washingtonian article

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Marie Arana.

• Official website
• Works by Marie Arana at Washington Post
• Appearances on C-SPAN