Victoria Shorr

About the Author

Someone asked a friend at a dinner the other night for Victoria Shorr’s address.

“She doesn’t have one,” the friend replied.

Shorr is a writer and political activist. Her first book, Backlands, was named one of Booklist’s top-ten first novels of 2016. Her third novel, The Plum Trees, was listed as a New York Times Recommended Historical Fiction selection for 2021. Her second book, Midnight, tells the stories of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and Joan of Arc in ways that haven’t been written till now.

Since women like Shorr, women living nowhere and standing slightly outside the door, haven’t been writing till now. They haven’t lived long enough. They died in childbirth. They were denied the pen and the page, denied even the language. They stood at stoves and in fields and barnyards or formal parlours from morning till night, with no chance to think beyond the next meal—theirs to cook.

But times have changed, and Shorr came of age through the turbulence of the sixties and seventies, through the anti-war and feminist movements, with those dreams of justice and equality almost within reach. Her books are linked by the kind of re-envisioning of established stories that her perspective has allowed her—that of a restless, inspired believer.

She lived in Brazil for ten years, then moved to Los Angeles, and co-founded the Archer School for Girls in 1995. More recently, she has worked to establish Anpo Wicahpi, the Pine Ridge Girls School, which opened in 2016, in South Dakota, the first all-girls, independent, culturally based, college-prep school on a Native reservation in America.

 She is married to writer/film maker John Perkins, and has three children and five grandchildren.