Biography:

Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Ann Chamberlin also spent big blocks of time as a child in Europe where her father was visiting professor of mathematics. After flitting from school to school and major to major including theater, history and English, she finally majored in Archaeology of the Middle East at the University of Utah. She spent a summer in Israel excavating the biblical city of Beersheva, traveling throughout the Holy Land and living in the old city of Jerusalem for a month. She reads Hebrew, Arabic, Egyptian hieroglyphs and ancient Akkadian as well as French and German. With her husband, she has traveled across all of North Africa, Turkey and Jordan. They have two sons and twelve chickens, and live in an old farm house on nearly two acres near Salt Lake City.

Ann is the author of ten historical novels, several of them named best foreign historical of the year by Romantic Times. Her trilogy set in the 16th-century Ottoman Empire has been on the bestsellers list in Turkey for six months. Her current project is a series called the Joan of Arc Tapestries. Four books of this series are published so far: THE MERLIN OF ST. GILLES' WELL, which Booklist gave a starred review and named one of the five best new fantasies of the year. THE MERLIN OF THE OAK WOOD, which Booklist gave a starred review and VOYA named one of the best new fantasies of the year. A third book has been published only in German translation. GLORIA: THE MERLIN AND THE SAINT is out in 2005 from High Country Publishers.

Ann is pleased to announce a nonfiction history of women in the Middle East entitled THE VEIL IN THE LOOKING GLASS has been released from Haworth Press.

She is the author of many plays which have been produced across the country from Seattle to New York. JIHAD, produced by New Perspectives Theatre in New York City, won The Off Off Broadway Review's best new play of the year in 1996.

Ann Chamberlin

Ann Chamberlin believes that the purpose of storytelling--as of all true art as well as all true religion--is to support positions in exact opposition to the views prevailing in a culture's powerhouses, whatever those views happen to be. Nowhere is this more crucial than in the retelling of history. As Milan Kundera tells us, people in the powerhouses are not so interested in who will control the future as in who controls the airbrushes in the labs where the past's photos are retouched.

Is Chamberlin on a crusade? You bet. Only please, let's not call it crusade, jihad or even mission. In her books, she hopes to wield her own airbrush, retell history from the points of view of people who did not get to tell their side because their side lost, usually for an excess of virtue, if anything. And the history of religions with crusades, jihads and/or missions are of particular fascination to her. She believes the notion of progress is the Great Lie. Sooner or later, she hopes to offend everyone--everyone who fancies his position in the powerhouse, anyway.

As a writer with a passionate interest in gender roles, Chamberlin finds she always needs a character who straddles those roles. The form of her story never appears clearly until she has found him/her. Chamberlin is attracted to study societies that have very strongly enforced gender roles and finds, without exception, that such societies always allow--often fiercely demand, in fact--the in-between role as well. An in-between role helps the society appreciate both sexes more. People in the modern US certainly don't even appreciate femininity. Not unless it is the femininity that caters to the alpha male. Chamberlin feels a need to counteract that.