Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her bestselling novels include Breathing Lessons , The Accidental Tourist , Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant , Ladder of Years , Back When We Were Grown-ups , Digging to America , A Spool of Blue Thread, Clock Dance, Redhead by the Side of the Road and French Braid. In 1989 she won the Pulitzer Prize; in 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as 'the greatest novelist writing in English'; and in 2012 she received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. In 2015 A Spool of Blue Thread was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Booker Prize; and in 2020 Redhead by the Side of the Road was longlisted for the Booker Prize.