Jessica Swan (1) (1980–)

Jessica Swan grew up in Bakersfield, California, and there, raised by a French mother and an American father, she learned early on how to combine her passion for contradictions with her love of storytelling. Eager to experience a more metropolitan life, she then lived in Seattle, San Diego, San Francisco and Manhattan. Deeply inspired by the places in which she lives, Swan lets the setting do most of the talking in her stories. She says, “A city can tell you so much. Sometimes you just have to stop and listen.”

Using her writing to explore paradoxes, Swan turns them upside down and sideways, all the while bringing her readers along with her as she tiptoes across the ordinary into the extraordinary. Her fascination with the delicacies of language, memory and intention began with her B.A. degree in Rhetoric from the University of California in Berkeley and writing for Psychology Today magazine in New York. She is greatly inspired by G.K. Chesterton, Marguerite Duras and Vladimir Nabokov. Dear Isabelle is her first novel. She has completed two more novels and is now writing a biography of her late mother, Jacqueline.

Swan currently lives with her husband David in London, England.