Ella Leffland

Highly regarded by other writers, her novels demonstrate stunning mastery of the techniques of realistic fiction; but Leffland uses her facility to illuminate characters whose imaginative lives are rich and often strange.

The settings of most of her works are in northern California, where she grew up; she is perhaps best known for her semi-autobiographical novel Rumors of Peace (1979; reprinted as a "rediscovered classic" in 2011) about a girl coming of age during World War II.

The fascination with personal and social evil that Leffland explores in Rumors of Peace emerges powerfully in her ambitious historical novel based on the life of Hermann Göring, Knight, Death and the Devil, published in 1990.

[1] She has written five novels and a collection of short stories, including Mrs. Munck (1970), a gothic tale of a woman's vengeance on the man who abandoned her decades before, made into a film adapted, directed, and starring Diane Ladd.

Leffland won the 2014 Gina Berriault Award from Fourteen Hills Review at San Francisco State University.