Doctor of Humane Letters
Chris Bohjalian, author of 18 books, has seen his work translated into more than 30 languages. Since graduating Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Amherst, Bohjalian has penned novels that regularly appear on the New York Times best-seller list, and three have become movies. He has won widespread acclaim for his narratives, which cover topics including midwifery, homelessness and, most recently, human trafficking.
The Washington Post, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Hartford Courant, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage and Salon have named Bohjalian’s works Best Books of theYear. The Sandcastle Girls—his 2012 work of historical fiction about the Armenian Genocide—won, among other awards, the Armenian National Committee of America’s Freedom Award and Arts and Letters Award and Russia’s Soglasie (Concord) Award. The Night Strangers earned him a 2012 New England Society Book Award, and he won a New England Book Award for his entire body of work in 2002. Bohjalian was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Trans-Sister Radio and saw his number-one New York Times best-seller Midwives selected for Oprah’s Book Club.
Arriving at what Bohjalian considers a finished product doesn’t happen with a first—or even second—draft. He once told The Boston Globe that he typically writes six or seven drafts, saying, “I depend upon my characters to take me by the hand and lead me through the dark of the story. I never have an outline. I’m usually about 75,000 words into a novel before I know what it’s about and how it’ll end.” Despite 21st-century technology that enables nearly anyone to self-publish with the click of a mouse, the Vermont-based author chooses to write his books with fountain pens. His rationale is a strategic one: “They are messy, and they force you to think more slowly.”
Bohjalian is a Fellow of the Vermont Academy of Arts and Sciences and has written for numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, Reader’s Digest and The Boston Globe Magazine. Bohjalian was a weekly columnist for Vermont’s Burlington Free Press from 1992 through 2015.