Alice Hoffman

Alice Hoffman was born in New York in 1952 and raised on Long Island; her grandmother was a Russian Jewish immigrant. She has published more than thirty books, among them Practical Magic (1995), which became a film and then a franchise, Turtle Moon, which won the Hammett Prize, and The World That We Knew (2019), a novel about Jewish children hidden from the Nazis, written after a reader told her at a signing that her own parents had placed her with a non-Jewish family to save her. After being treated for breast cancer at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she helped establish the hospital's Hoffman Breast Center.