Alice Hoffman

In September 2019 Hoffman released "The World That We Knew" based on a true story told to her by a fan at a book signing. The woman confided to Hoffman that during World War 2, her Jewish parents had her live with non-Jewish people to escape the Nazis. These were known as "hidden children" and Hoffman thought about this woman and her unusual upbringing for years before deciding to travel to Europe and learn more.

She was the recipient of a New Jersey Notable Book Award for Ice Queen. She won a Hammett Prize for Turtle Moon. She wrote the screenplay for the 1983 film Independence Day, starring Kathleen Quinlan and Dianne Wiest.

When Hoffman was twenty-one and studying at Stanford, her first short story, At The Drive-In, was published in Volume 3 of the literary magazine Fiction. Editor Ted Solotaroff contacted her, and asked whether she had a novel. At that point, she began writing her first novel, Property Of. It was published in 1977, by Farrar Straus and Giroux, now a division of Macmillan Publishers. A section of Property Of was published in Solotaroff's literary magazine, American Review.

Alice Hoffman was born in New York City and raised on Long Island, New York. Her grandmother was a Russian-Jewish immigrant. She graduated from Valley Stream North High School in 1969, and then from Adelphi University with a Bachelor of Arts. She was a Mirrielees Fellow at the Stanford University Creative Writing Center in 1973 and 1974, where she earned a Master of Arts in Creative Writing.

Alice Hoffman (born March 16, 1952) is an American novelist and young-adult and children's writer, best known for her 1995 novel Practical Magic, which was adapted for a 1998 film of the same name. Many of her works fall into the genre of magic realism and contain elements of magic, irony, and non-standard romances and relationships.

She is currently working on the third novel in the "Practical Magic" series. "The third book is about Maria Owens, the original ancestor of the family, in the 1600s. It's been great fun to be back with the Owens family and to discover their secrets."