Mary Ann Shaffer

Mary Ann Shaffer (1934–2008) was an American writer, editor, librarian and bookseller, born in Martinsburg, West Virginia. She worked as an editor at Harper & Row, then in public libraries and bookshops in Marin County, California. She began her only novel, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, in the early 2000s at the urging of her writing group; when her health failed she handed the revisions to her niece, the children's author Annie Barrows, who finished the book. It was published in 2008, shortly after Shaffer's death, and has since been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for the cinema in 2018.