The Power (Alderman) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth— 1974
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Oxford University; University of East Anglia
• Awards—Orange Prize-New Writers; Baileys Women's Prize-Fiction
• Currently—lives in London, England


Naomi Alderman is an English author, novelist and game designer whose most recent novel, The Power, won the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

Born in London, the daughter of Geoffrey Alderman, a specialist in Anglo-Jewish history, Naomi attended Lincoln College, Oxford, where she read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Following Oxford, she studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

From 2003-07, Alderman was the lead writer for Perplex City, an alternate reality game, at Mind Candy. She went on to become lead writer on the running video game Zombies, Run! which launched in 2012.

Since 2012, Alderman has been Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She continues to write a monthly technology column for The Guardian.

Novels
Alderman's literary debut came in 2006 with Disobedience, a well-received (if controversial) novel about a North London rabbi's lesbian daughter living in New York. The novel garnered her the 2006 Orange Award for New Writers. Writing the book Alderman to reject her life as a practising Jew. "I went into the novel religious and by the end I wasn’t. I wrote myself out of it," she told Claire Armistead of The Guardian in 2016.

Her second novel, The Lessons, was published in 2010, and her third, The Liar's Gospel in 2012. That work portrays Jesus as an "inconsequential preacher," as described by Jewish Renaissance Magazine, which also referred to the novel as "uncomfortable and problematic."

Alderman's first three novels were all serialized on BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime.

In 2016, Alderman published The Power, a dystopian novel about young women who develop the ability to deliver deadly electrical shocks and who misuse their new found power. The book won the 2017 Baileys Women Prize for Fiction.

Recognition
2006 - Orange Prize for New Writers
2007 - Sunday Times New Writer of the Year
2012 - Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative*
2013 - Granta's 20 Best Young Writers list
2017 - Baileys Women's Prize-Fiction

* The Initiative is an international philanthropic program which pairs, for one year, "masters" in a specific discipline with emerging talents. Margaret Atwood selected Alderman as her protege, and the result was Alderman's fourth novel, The Power, which she dedicated to Atwood. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/18/2018.)