American · b. 1981
Katharine Smyth is an American writer and teacher. She grew up in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and studied at Harvard and Oxford. Her first book, All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf (2019), is a memoir about the death of her father and her repeated readings of Woolf's To the Lighthouse. It joins personal narrative to literary criticism and biography. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Paris Review Daily, The New York Times, and other publications. She has taught writing at the college level. Her work belongs to the tradition of books that use a single novel to think about a life, and it has been read as a modern companion to Woolf.