David Guterson

Biography

David Guterson was born in 1956 in Seattle, Washington, and grew up in the Pacific Northwest that saturates his fiction. He studied creative writing at the University of Washington under Charles Johnson and later studied with Raymond Carver. He worked as a high school English teacher on Bainbridge Island — a community with direct historical ties to Japanese internment, as Bainbridge Island Japanese-Americans were among the first removed under Executive Order 9066. He wrote Snow Falling on Cedars over ten years while teaching full-time. The novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1995 and became a massive commercial success, selling over four million copies.

David Guterson at a glance