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Biographical Information for Patricia Collins Wrede I was born on March 27, 1953 in Chicago, Illinois. I am the eldest of five siblings (four girls and one boy). Currently, I have four nephews and four nieces living in Alabama, Maine, and Illinois. Everyone in my family is a voracious reader, and I grew up surrounded by books (pretty much literally--we had bookshelves on nearly every flat wall in the house, and there were books in the back of the linen cupboard, books in the bathroom storage shelves behind the cleaning supplies and towels, and books in all the closets). Among my favorites were the Oz books (I have over thirty of them), the Narnia Chronicles, and a long list of collections of fairy tales and myths. I graduated from high school in 1970 and attended Carleton College in Minnesota, where I earned an A.B. in Biology in 1974. Then I moved up the road to Minneapolis/St. Paul and worked in clerical jobs for a year before returning to school at the University of Minnesota for my M.B.A. I married James M. Wrede in 1976, got my M.B.A. in 1977, and started working as a financial analyst while writing in my spare time. I sold my first novel, Shadow Magic, in 1980 (it was published two years later, in 1982). In the same year, I became a founding member of the Interstate Writers' Workshop, aka the Scribblies, to which I belonged for five extremely productive years. By 1985, I was having increasing difficulty in balancing a full-time job in finance with full-time writing. Something had to give, and with a lot of support from my friends and family, I chose to quit my day job and write. Since then, I have made my living as a fiction writer. Jim and I divorced in 1991; I have no children. I still live in the suburbs of the Twin Cities with my two cats, currently Cazaril (a Maine Coon/tabby mix) and Nimue (an elderly medium-hair of uncertain parentage). Questions regarding foreign rights, film/tv subrights, and other business matters should be directed to my agent Ginger Clark, Curtis-Brown, Ltd., 10 Astor Place, 3rd Floor New York, NY 10003, gc@cbltd.com |