Annie Dillard

American author who won the Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) — a work of intense, microscopic observation of nature — and who wrote The Writing Life (1989), one of the most beloved accounts of the writing process and the demands of creative work.

Created the most celebrated account of intense creative observation — Pilgrim at Tinker Creek demonstrated that paying radical attention to one small place and one year could reveal cosmological truths, and The Writing Life's meditation on the effort and strangeness of writing became canonical for anyone struggling with creative work.