[1] Marie Arana was born in Lima, Peru in 1949,[2] the daughter of Jorge Enrique Arana Cisneros, a Peruvian-born civil engineer, and Marie Elverine Clapp Campbell, an American from Kansas and Boston, whose family has deep roots in the United States.

[citation needed] She began her career in book publishing, becoming vice president and senior editor at Harcourt Brace and Simon & Schuster.

She is married to Jonathan Yardley, the Post's former chief book critic, and has two children from a previous marriage and two stepchildren.

Arana is the author of a memoir about a bicultural childhood American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood (finalist for the 2001 National Book Award as well as the Martha PEN/Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir); editor of a collection of Washington Post essays about the writer's craft, The Writing Life (2002); and the author of Cellophane (a satirical novel set in the Peruvian Amazon, published in 2006, and a finalist for the John Sargent Prize).

Arana is the Vice President of the 149-year-old Literary Society of Washington and a member of the Board of Trustees of PEN America.

Her commentary has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Virginia Quarterly Review,[9] USA Today, Civilization, Smithsonian, National Geographic, and numerous other literary publications throughout the Americas.

In September 2009, she was elected to the Scholars' Council of the Library of Congress as well as the Board of Directors of the National Book Festival.

In October 2015, Arana was named Chair of the Cultures of the Countries of the South, an honorary post at the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress.

Bolivar and Silver, Sword and Stone have received accusations of hispanophobia, antiespañolismo, stereotyping, sectarianism and misinformation from those offended by Arana's stern criticism of Spain's colonial depredations of Latin America.

[15] The Washington Post wrote that, "Her fragmented and beautifully written narrative, which washes over readers in a series of portraits, rather than as one continuous story, is a perfect representation of Latino diversity".