Biography: About Peggy Payne

Peggy Payne is a novelist, nonfiction writer, and private editorial consultant. Her research for her travel writing and novels has taken her to more than 25 countries. Her most recent novel Sister India is a New York Times Notable Book. She is author of the novel Revelation (screen rights sold to Synergy Films) and a co-author, with Allan Luks, of The Healing Power of Doing Good. She also wrote a book on a clothing firm, Doncaster: A Legacy of Personal Style.

Photograph by Karen Tam

Her articles, reviews, or essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Family Circle, Travel+Leisure, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and many others.

Her work has been cited in Best American Short Stories and published in anthologies including God: Stories, edited by Atlantic Monthly fiction editor C. Michael Curtis, New Stories from the South, and Remarkable Reads. An interview with her, "Writing and Revelation," is included in Dale Brown's Of Fiction and Faith: Twelve American Writers Talk about Their Vision and Work.

She has been the recipient of an NEH grant to study fiction at Berkeley, and an Indo-American Fellowship to research Sister India in Varanasi, a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, the Sherwood Anderson Award, and others.

Her public speaking has taken her to locations from Banaras Hindu University to Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church.

She has years of experience contracting with ad agencies and corporate clients, writing scripts, print ads, TV spots, speeches, catalogues, and brochures.

Peggy Payne writes, and works with other writers, in a sunny office in the Historic Oakwood section at the edge of downtown Raleigh, NC, sharing space with writer/artist Carrie Knowles and her Free Range Studio. She drives home to a log house on a pond in rural Chatham County where she lives with her husband, psychologist Bob Dick. From her husband's special interest in clinical hypnosis, she learned much that contributed to Sister India being repeatedly described by critics as "mesmerizing."

A lifelong North Carolina resident, she was born in Wilmington. Her brother Franc Payne lives in Wilmington, is in the mortgage consulting business and renovates coastal houses. Brother Harry Payne works for the agency managing economic recovery funds for North Carolina. Sister-in-law Ruth Sheehan writes a column for the Raleigh News & Observer. Peggy has two adult stepsons and four handsome young nephews. She is a slapdash but enthusiastic gardener. She dabbles in French and other languages. Her ideal weekend plan is to "read-weed-and-bead," and hang out with husband Bob.

books by
Peggy Payne: