Jodi Picoult

Jodi Picoult (born 1966) is an American novelist whose bestselling fiction takes on contested moral and social questions, often through a courtroom drama. She was born in Nesconset, New York, in 1966.

She studied English at Princeton, graduating in 1987, and later took a master's degree in education at Harvard. Her first novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale, appeared in 1992. She won the New England Bookseller Award for Fiction in 2003. Her breakthrough, My Sister's Keeper, was published by Atria on 6 April 2004; it is about a girl conceived as a donor for her sick sister and was filmed by New Line Cinema in 2009. Nineteen Minutes (Atria, 9 March 2007), about a school shooting, was her first book to debut at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Later novels include Small Great Things (2016), A Spark of Light (2018), The Book of Two Ways (2020), Mad Honey (2022, written with Jennifer Finney Boylan) and By Any Other Name (2024). With her daughter Samantha van Leer she wrote the young adult novels Between the Lines (2012) and Off the Page (2015).

Around 40 million copies of her books are in print, in 34 languages.

For collectors, the 1992 debut Songs of the Humpback Whale predates her fame. The Atria first editions of My Sister's Keeper (2004) and Nineteen Minutes (2007) mark her rise to number one bestseller status.