Water for Elephants

by Sara Gruen

About the Author

Photo by Terence W. Bailey

Sara Gruen is Canadian by birth, but moved to the U.S. in 1999 for a technical writing job at a statistical software company. When she was laid off after two years, she and her husband decided it was as good a time as any for Gruen to try her hand at fiction, something she had dreamt of doing since she was a small child. The gamble paid off: Sara Gruen is now the author of four novels, although the first is what she calls her "drawer book," which she plans to leave in that drawer and never publish.

Riding Lessons (2004) was Gruen's first published novel, but despite its popular and critical success, Gruen's editor rejected her second novel because it was so different from her first. Undeterred, Gruen wrote and published Flying Changes (2005), and then went back to that rejected second novel and tried again to get it published. This time she was successful, and Water for Elephants appeared in 2006. In many ways, the subject matter of Water for Elephants was a very unlikely one for Gruen to explore, because she readily confesses that before beginning work on the novel, she had never even been to the circus. She admits, too, that she had to finish the novel by locking herself in a closet to shut out all distractions (http://www.powells.com/interviews/gruen.html).
Still, Gruen's efforts in researching the novel and completing it in seclusion seem well worth it, given the novel's success. The novel has garnered praise from critics and was selected by independent booksellers as the #1 Book Sense pick for June, 2006.

Sara Gruen is now at work on her fourth novel at her home in Northern Illinois, where she lives in an environmentalist community with her husband, three children, and an assortment of non-circus animals.

Sara Gruen’s Homepage: http://www.saragruen.com/