Anthony Doerr was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. He attended Bowdoin College in Maine, receiving a degree in history, and earned a Master of Fine Arts from Bowling Green State University. Doerr has written two short story collections, including The Shell Collector (2002) and Memory Wall (2010), and three novels, including About Grace (2004); All the Light We Cannot See (2014), which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction; and Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021). In addition, he has released a memoir, Four Seasons in Rome (2008). Many of Doerr’s stories are set in Africa and New Zealand, both places he has lived and worked. The locations in About Grace include Doerr’s hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, and his current residence in Boise, Idaho, among other locations.

Doerr writes with an almost poetic prose that often uses nature to explore the complexities of human existence. In About Grace, he uses the complexity of water to express such things as the flow of time and the way that time seems to allow a certain repetition as it moves through cycles.