Tracy Chevalier

Tracy Chevalier is an Anglo-American writer of historical fiction, best known for her 1999 novel The Girl with a Pearl Earring. Born in Washington D.C. but a resident of the United Kingdom for the past 35 years, Chevalier worked as a reference book editor for a number of years before composing her debut novel, The Virgin Blue, in 1997. Two years later she achieved her breakthrough success with Girl with a Pearl Earring, a fictionalised account of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Vermeer and the model who posed for his eponymous portrait. Girl with a Pearl Earring swiftly became a bestseller and was adapted for the big screen in 2003 in a version starring Scarlett Johansson. Chevalier has written nine further novels, set in various periods from late medieval Paris to 1970s Washington.