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The Emperor's Club

Ethan Canin

Ethan was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his parents, who lived in Iowa City at the time, were vacationing. His father taught violin in the music department at the University of Iowa, before the family moved from Iowa City to Oberlin, Ohio, and Philadelphia, eventually settling in San Francisco, where Ethan spent most of his childhood.

Ethan enrolled at Stanford University, first majoring in engineering and then earning his undergraduate degree in English. In 1982, he joined the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Two years later, he left Iowa with an MFA and about 50 total pages written, considering himself a failure at writing. “In the usual adult panic,” he says he applied to Harvard Medical School. During his first year there, he wrote a book that was published two years later. Ethan then took a seven-year break, traveling to South America before again settling in San Francisco.

Finishing his medical degree in 1991, Ethan began an internal medicine residency at the University of California, San Francisco. He continued to write and practice medicine, but following the publication of The Palace Thief, he decided to refocus his professional life and concentrate on writing.

With two friends, Ethan started The Writers’ Grotto in San Francisco—now hugely successful, it’s an office of 19 writers and filmmakers. In 1998, Ethan joined the Iowa Writers’ Workshop faculty. Author of two collections of stories, Emperor of the Air and The Palace Thief, and three novels, Blue River, For Kings and Planets, and Carry Me Across the Water, he is also director of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. He and his wife, Barbara, have two daughters. Ethan likes to work with wood and is building a giant tree house in the back yard of his Iowa City home.

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