Ann Brashares

Before she wrote fiction, Ann Brashares edited it for other people, first at the book packager 17th Street Productions and then at Alloy Entertainment, where she rose to co-president. Her earliest bylines were brisk business biographies of Linus Torvalds and Steve Jobs, both published in 2001, the year The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants appeared. That premise, four friends passing a single pair of jeans between them across a summer apart, began with an Alloy colleague, the editor Jodi Anderson, who had shared trousers with her own friends; the two accounts of how the idea moved across differ. Brashares carried the four girls through three more summers, in The Second Summer of the Sisterhood, Girls in Pants and Forever in Blue, then returned to them as adults in Sisterhood Everlasting. Born in Alexandria, Virginia in 1967 and brought up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, she read philosophy at Barnard College and lives in New York with the painter Jacob Collins and their four children.