Victoria Shorr

About the Author

Victoria Shorr has been compared to John O’Hara, Henry James, Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

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, “a flamboyant display of empathy and wit,” where “the line between fact and fiction seems to disappear,” tells the stories of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and Joan of Arc. Her fourth, Mid-Air, was called a “ minor masterpiece” in the Wall Street Journal.

None of these books would have come to light had they not somehow gotten over the transom of Starling Lawrence. Where there had been nothing but no’s, there was suddenly a yes—from the legendary Editor-in-Chief at W. W. Norton, no less. He published Backlands in 2015. Shorr was in her sixties.

It would have been harder if the dream of publication had been all she had to live on. But Shorr came of age steeped in the activism of the sixties and seventies, and she had not only her writing but her dreams of social justice and equality to keep her going. In 1995, stirred deeply by the deplorable treatment of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings, she was moved to co-found the Archer School for Girls that opened in L.A. in 1995 [https://www.archer.org]. Twenty years later, she co-founded the Pine Ridge Girls School [https://pineridgegirlsschool.org], the first independent, Lakota girls’ school in America.

Like her books, the schools are linked by a re-envisioning, in this case of what progressive, empowering education looks like, for girls in L.A. and those on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Shorr lived in Brazil for ten years, then moved to Los Angeles, and now is based in New York.

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