American author whose novels often portrayed the intersecting lives of characters from disparate backgrounds.

When Patchett was six years old, her family moved to Nashville, Tenn., where she grew up and where she made her home. She obtained a B.A. degree (1984) from Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, N.Y., and an M.F.A. (1987) from the University of Iowa. Her first work of fiction was published while she was an undergraduate. Patchett later held appointments at colleges and universities, including the position of Tennessee Williams (Williams, Tennessee) fellow in creative writing at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., in 1997. From the beginning of her career, she won numerous awards for her writing, and in 1994 she received a Guggenheim fellowship.

Though she was widely published as a short-story writer and essayist, Patchett became best known for her novels. Her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), tells the story of a young pregnant woman who leaves the husband she does not love to travel to a home for unwed mothers. There, as her feelings change and she creates a new family, so do her plans for the future. The novel was adapted as a television movie in 1997. In Taft (1994) the black manager of a blues bar who is mourning the loss of his son finds a new family when he hires a young white woman, Fay Taft, and becomes involved in the problems of her brother, Carl. Patchett also wrote a screen adaptation of the novel. The Magician's Assistant (1997) relates the discoveries of the widow of a homosexual magician named Parsifal. The woman, who also had been her husband's assistant, visits the family he had never told her of and learns about his past.

With her fourth novel, Bel Canto, Patchett established her prominence among contemporary writers. The novel, set somewhere in South America, explores relationships between terrorists and hostages who, shut off from the rest of the world, find unexpected bonds. One of the hostages is a renowned operatic diva, and music becomes the medium by which the characters in the novel communicate. The novel received the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 2005 Patchett published her first full-length volume of nonfiction writing, Truth and Beauty, a memoir recounting her friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, who died of a drug overdose in 2002. Patchett returned to fiction with her next book, Run (2007), which explores the relationship between an ambitious father and his two sons.