Gin Phillips

Gin Phillips is the author of five novels. Her debut novel, The Well and the Mine, was the winner of the 2009 Barnes & Noble Discover Award. Since then her work has been sold in 29 countries.

Born in Montgomery, AL, Phillips graduated from Birmingham-Southern College with a degree in political journalism. She worked as a magazine writer for more than a decade, living in Ireland, New York, and Washington D.C., before eventually moving back to Alabama.

She currently lives in Birmingham with her family.

Phillips's new novel is Fierce Kingdom.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I have a habit of falling in love with a writer and then buying a pile of their books and binge reading them one after the other. This is a terrible way to read. I know it. It’s not the way to most fully appreciate an author… yet I get a bit obsessed and do it anyway. So I am nearly finished with my third Penelope Lively book in a row: Moon Tiger is a brilliant novel about a female historian who, as she’s dying, decides to write the history of the world, which just happens to overlap with her own personal history. I’m happy to say I’m more captivated by Lively now than I was after first discovering her lovely and moving How It All Began. (Note: She’s been writing for nearly five decades, so I don’t know how I've missed her all this time.)

Moon Tiger has everything I’ve loved about Lively’s other books—first of all, the sentences are stunning. Elegant but not showy. The characters are likable even when they shouldn’t be, because she has such generosity towards her characters. The voice is both clever and wise. I spend a lot of time thinking, oh, man, I wish I’d written this.

Next in my stack is Elena Ferrante’s The Story of a New Name, the second book in the Neapolitan novels. That will be nice because those are books I actually should read one after the other.

Visit Gin Phillips's website.

--Marshal Zeringue