Andrea Barrett was born in 1954 and grew up on Cape Cod. She studied at Union College in Schenectady, New York, where she received a BA in biology and briefly attended a PhD in zoology. She began writing seriously in her thirties and first found significant success with Ship Fever (1996) a collection of short stories that won the National Book Award. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001. Her 2002 collection of short stories, Servants of the Map, was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.