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Ethan Canin is an accomplished American fiction writer and the F. Wendell Miller Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1960, Canin completed a degree in Engineering at Stanford University before attending the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop and receiving his MFA in 1984. Fearing he would not make it as a writer, he then completed a medical degree at Harvard and began a career in medicine. He published his first novel, Blue River, in 1991. With the publication of his fourth book, he returned to the Writers’ Workshop to teach for a semester in 1998 and has since left medicine for a full-time faculty position. 

Canin is known for his attention to detail, which is evident in “The Palace Thief,” as well as for his focus on perception, psychology, and politics. The Palace Thief (1994), the collection that includes the short story of the same title, was his second collection and earned the California Book Award in 1995. Canin’s works have won various awards and fellowships, including the 1987 Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for his debut short story collection, Emperor of the Air, and more recently the 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1996, Canin was named one of the “Best Young American Novelists” by Granta and as one of twenty “Writers for the New Millennium” by The New Yorker. Many of Canin’s works have been adapted for film, including Blue River, The Palace Thief, The Year of Getting to Know Us, and Beautiful Ohio.

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