Marie Arana is a Peruvian-American author of nonfiction and fiction, senior advisor to two U.S. Librarians of Congress, the inaugural literary director of the Library of Congress, The John W. Kluge Center’s former Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South, and a writer-at-large for The Washington Post. She is currently secretary of PEN America’s Board of Trustees. In 2020, she received an award for her lifetime work in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
For many years, Arana was editor-in-chief of The Washington Post’s literary section, Book World. As books editor of the Post, she was instrumental in establishing the National Book Festival in 2001 and served as the festival’s literary director for many years. She is currently the Senior Executive Producer of America’s Book Club, a prime-time national television show on writers and their craft that airs Sunday nights on C-SPAN.
Her memoir American Chica (2001) was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir; her novel Cellophane was a finalist for the John Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize in 2007; and her biography of Simón Bolívar won the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2019, the American Library Association named her sweeping history of Latin America, Silver, Sword, and Stone, the top nonfiction book of the year. That same year, the American Writers Museum conferred on Arana the inaugural Friend of the Writer Award. In 2021, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden bestowed on her the Library of Congress Award for Superior Service. In 2024, The New Yorker called her book on the Hispanic population of the United States, LatinoLand, one of twelve essential books of the year.
Arana has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, TIME, the International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Spain’s El País, Colombia’s El Tiempo, and Peru’s El Comercio, among many other publications.