Ruta Sepetys

b. 1967

2 standalone books

🏆 1 award & honors · incl. Indies Choice Book Award

Ruta Sepetys (Rūta Šepetys) is an internationally acclaimed author of historical fiction published in over fifty countries and thirty-six languages. Her novels, Between Shades of Gray and Out of the Easy, are New York Times bestsellers and international bestsellers. Her latest novel, Salt to the Sea, is a #1 New York Times bestseller and winner of the Carnegie Medal. Her books have won or been shortlisted for over forty book prizes and are included on over twenty state reading lists. Ruta is the daughter of a Lithuanian refugee. Born in Michigan, she was raised in a family of artists, readers, and music lovers. She attended college to study opera but graduated with a degree in International Finance. Before publishing her first novel, she spent twenty years in the music industry helping artists and songwriters distill story through song. Sepetys is the first American crossover novelist to address both the European Parliament and the Library of Congress. She was awarded The Rockefeller Foundation’s prestigious Bellagio Resident Fellowship for Salt to the Sea. She was recently bestowed the Cross of the Knight of the Order by the President of Lithuania for her contributions to education and memory preservation. She is intensely proud to be Lithuanian, even if that means she has a name no one can pronounce. Ruta lives in a treehouse in the hills of Tennessee.

Born

1967