Discipline: Literature – nonfiction

Rebecca Donner

Discipline: Literature – nonfiction
Region: Ipswich, MA
MacDowell Fellowships: 2025
More: www.rebeccadonner.com

Rebecca Donner was a 2023-2024 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and a 2023 Visiting Scholar at Oxford. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in London, and in 2022, she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.

Her third book is the New York Times bestseller All the Frequent Troubles Of Our Days, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and the Chautauqua Prize, and was shortlisted for the Plutarch Award.

At MacDowell, she worked on her next book, a biography of Sophie Scholl to be published by Random House in 2026.

Portrait by Beowulf Sheehan

Studios

Veltin

Rebecca Donner worked in the Veltin studio.

Veltin Studio was donated by alumni of the Veltin School, a school for girls in New York with a highly respected visual arts department. As the plaque just outside the entrance attests, this studio was used by poet Edwin Arlington Robinson during most of the 24 summers he spent at MacDowell. Perhaps most famously, Thornton Wilder put the finishing…

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