Rebecca Donner is a Canadian-born writer. She is the author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, which won the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and The Chautauqua Prize^[1][2] She was a 2023 Visiting Scholar at Oxford,^[3] and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in recognition of her contribution to historical scholarship.^[4] She is currently a 2023-2024 Fellow at Harvard.^[5]

Biography

Donner was born in Canada, and during childhood lived in Japan, Michigan, Virginia, and California.^[6][7] She received her BA from the University of California, Berkeley and MFA from Columbia University.^[8][9] She taught writing at Wesleyan University.^[10] She wrote “Sunset Terrace,” a novel set in Los Angeles, followed by “Burnout,” a graphic novel about ecoterrorism.^[9]

In 2021, Donner published a biography, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, of her great-great-aunt, Mildred Harnack, an American who was part of the Nazi resistance in Germany and was executed in 1943 on Hitler's orders.^[7][9][11] The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and The Chautauqua Prize^{[1][9][12][13][14][15]} All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Plutarch Award,^[16] and a shortlisted nominee for the Governor General's Award for English-language non-fiction at the 2022 Governor General's Awards.^[17] Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird praised the book as "a stunning literary achievement."^[18][19]

Donner is an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in recognition of her contribution to historical scholarship. ^[20] She received a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship in the general nonfiction category.^[21] In 2023, Donner was a Visiting Scholar at Oxford.^[3] She is currently a 2023-2024 Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.^[5]

Awards and honors

• 2023-2024 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, Harvard^[5]
• 2023 Visiting Scholar, Oxford^[3]
• 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship^[22]
• 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography^[23]
• 2022 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography^[24]
• 2022 Chautauqua Prize^[1]
• 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, finalist^[25]
• 2022 Governor General's Literary Award, finalist^[26]
• 2022 Plutarch Award, finalist^[27]

Works

• Donner, Rebecca (2021). All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler. New York: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 978-0-316-56169-3.^{[28][29][12][30]}
• Donner, Rebecca (2008). Burnout. New York. ISBN 9781401215378.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)^[31]
• Donner, Rebecca (2003). Sunset Terrace. MacAdam/Cage. ISBN 978-1-931561-34-1.^[32][33][34]

References