Judith Thurman (b. 1946) is an American writer, biographer, and critic. She is the recipient of the 1983 National Book Award for nonfiction for her biography Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller. Her book Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette was a finalist for the 1999 nonfiction National Book Award. In 2016, she received the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.
She is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine.
In 1967, Thurman graduated from Brandeis University with a Bachelor of Arts for her post-secondary education.
She began her literary career as a poet and translator. The Covent Garden Press, in London, published her first book of poems, Putting My Coat On, in 1972.
In the 1970s, Atheneum, in New York, published I Became Alone, a book of essays on women poets, for young people, and a volume of poetry for children, Flashlight, which has been regularly anthologized for more than forty years.
In 1973, Thurman returned to New York after five years in Europ...
