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Garrison Keillor is the author of ten books and the host of A Prairie Home Companion, heard weekly on public radio stations from coast to coast.

Keillor was born in Anoka, Minnesota, in 1942. He started in radio as a freshman at the University of Minnesota, at a closed-circuit station, WMMR, then at KUOM, and was hired by Minnesota Public Radio in 1969, where he has been ever since, with a few years off here and there for good behavior.

On July 6, 1974, he did the first broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion, before an audience of twenty persons in a theater in St. Paul. (The show ended in 1987, resumed in 1989 in New York as The American Radio Company, resumed the name A Prairie Home Companion in 1993 and returned to Minnesota.) It is now heard each week on more than 410 public radio stations by approximately 2.2 million listeners. Keillor also hosts a daily five-minute program, The Writer's Almanac. He is a frequent contributor to Time magazine, and the author of ten books, including Lake Wobegon Days (1985) and The Book of Guys (1993), and his latest book, coming out in late October, Wobegon Boy, the saga of John Tollefson, last seen leaving home in Lake Wobegon Days.

Keillor's recording of Lake Wobegon Days received a Grammy Award; he has also received two ACE Awards for cable TV and a George Foster Peabody Award. In 1994, he was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame at the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago.

As for his off-stage life, Keillor says:

"It was a summer of travel - to Denmark and Sweden and to Scotland for the Edinburgh Book Festival - and now my wife and I are settling in for a quiet fall and a peaceable winter. I turned 55 this summer, a very cheerful day made even more so by a visit from two of my high school English teachers, Helen Story and Lois Melby, who are bright and funny and nimble and in their early eighties, and as always, a great inspiration.

"I finished a book in August, which is a great relief - immediately, one's mind is free to consider the next big project. Some disappointments: a movie script that I slaved over and wrote and rewrote has languished, and a TV pilot went nowhere, but neither of those are really nettlesome disappointments. I got far enough with the TV pilot project to see that commercial network television is another world entirely from public radio. Smart people in television, but I don't envy them, having to produce work that they themselves don't relish.

"And life is good here. My children are well and busily occupied and seem to enjoy my company, my parents are in good spirits and enjoying life in the slow track, and my friends are feisty and loyal and full of interesting tales, and as for me, I got to look at the inside of my heart with an ultrasound machine and it was still pumping and, according to experts, is likely to continue for awhile, and where there's life, there's hope.

"I work too hard, and I feel dulled by it, but I am married to a lively woman, and together we make good company. She is a tireless reader, a lover of opera and theater, she knows the names of flowers and trees and birds, she is good-hearted and wickedly funny, and, as I have told her many times, she is good to be married to. In the next year, I hope to begin writing a play, start a new novel, and compile an anthology of poems from The Writer's Almanac. Most of all I hope to enjoy this new season of our old show."


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