Ethan Canin spent most of his childhood in San Francisco. He graduated from Stanford University with a degree in English after having first majored in Engineering. In 1982, he joined the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa where he earned an MFA. "In the usual adult panic," he says he applied to Harvard Medical School. Before completing medical school, he took a seven-year break, traveling to South America before again settling in San Francisco.
Canin returned to medical school to earn his degree in 1991, and began an internal medicine residency at the University of California, San Francisco. He continued to write and practice medicine before deciding to concentrate his professional focus on writing.
Canin was a co-founder of The Writers' Grotto in San Francisco, which is now an office of 19 writers and filmmakers. In 1998, Ethan joined the Iowa Writers' Workshop faculty.
In 2002, the movie EMPEROR'S CLUB, based on THE PALACE THIEF, was released. BEAUTIFUL OHIO, a movie based on another Canin short story and starring William Hurt, is scheduled for release in 2007.
Canin is the director of the Sun Valley Writers' Conference, and has published the following:
Short Story Collections
* The Palace Thief (1994)
* Emperor of the Air (1988)
Novels
* Blue River (novel) (1992)
* For Kings And Planets (1999)
* Carry Me Across The Water (2002)
