yrie James was born in Poughkeepsie,
New York, and moved west at age one because her father didn't like
shoveling snow. She has lived most of her life in California, if you
don't count the two years as a child when she lived in France.After a successful career as a screenwriter, in which she sold nineteen screenplays and teleplays in a variety of genres to Tri-Star Pictures, Fox Family Films, ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX TV and the Lifetime Network, Syrie decided to follow her passion and write a novel. She was thrilled when her first work of historical fiction, The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen, sold at auction after a two-day bidding war between three major publishing houses.
Syrie grew up in San Jose, California. Her father, Morton Astrahan, was one of the fathers of computer science. Her mother, Joann, told Syrie: "You can be anything you want to be when you grow up. Except maybe a famous model. They need really good cheek bones."
When Syrie was in the sixth grade, her grandparents gave her a battered old typewriter, and she wrote her first book. "Thankfully," Syrie says, "I never showed it to anyone. But I was hooked. Creating stories and characters, and retreating into my imagination, was thrilling to me. I knew at that moment that I wanted to be a writer."
Syrie was Valedictorian of her high school class, and graduated cum laude from U.C. Davis with a B.A. in English and Communications, where she was awarded a Departmental Citation for Outstanding Accomplishment in English.
Syrie has long been a fan of British literature of the 19th
century. She also enjoys reading in a variety of other genres,
including historical fiction, women's fiction, biography, memoir, historical romance, mystery, and the classics.
Two of her favorite authors are Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte.
Her husband, who has joined her in watching all the film versions of Miss Austen's
novels several times over, and every film version of Jane Eyre ever made, has come to share her enthusiasm, if not her
obsession. Syrie lived in Paris when she was seven years old, and had visited more than two dozen countries by age eight, which instilled in her a lifelong love of traveling. Her other favorite pursuits include movies, the theater, playing Scrabble, photography, sewing, costuming, rubber stamping, underwater basketweaving (just kidding), and the out of doors. Like Jane Austen, Syrie is very fond of a long walk!
When she's not reading or writing, Syrie's preferred activity is to spend time with her husband and family. Syrie married her college sweetheart, Bill James, and she considers their sons Ryan and Jeff to be her finest achievements!
Ryan, Syrie, Jeff and Bill
HARPER COLLINS AUTHOR WEBSITE
BLOG: Riding With The Top Down
"The Woman Who Became Jane Austen"
Risky Regencies Interview
Q & A with Syrie James
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