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Charlie Lovett was born in Winston-Salem, NC in 1962 and grew up as the child of a book-collecting English professor. He spent his summers in the rural North Carolina mountains and felt an early affinity for the countryside. He was educated at\xa0Summit School,\xa0Woodberry Forest School\xa0(Virginia), and\xa0Davidson College\xa0(NC) and in 1984 went into the antiquarian book business with his first wife, Stephanie. About the same time he began to seriously collect books and other materials relating to Lewis Carroll, author of\xa0Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland.

Lovett now has a large collection of Carrollian rare books and artifacts, including Carroll\u2019s 1888 typewriter and one of six privately owned copies of the first edition of\xa0Alice in Wonderland. Lovett has written or edited nine books about Lewis Carroll, including\xa0Lewis Carroll: Formed by Faith, the first full length study of Carroll\u2019s religious life (UVA Press, 2021). He has served as the president of the\xa0Lewis Carroll Society of North America, as editor of the London based\xa0Lewis Carroll Review, and has lectured on Carroll in the US and Europe at the Smithsonian Institution, Harvard University, UCLA, Oxford University, and elsewhere.

In 1997 Lovett received an MFA in Writing from\xa0Vermont College\xa0(now Vermont College of Fine Arts). During his work on this degree he researched and wrote\xa0Love, Ruth, a book about his mother, Ruth Candler Lovett, who died when he was two years old. Maya Angelou called the book \u201ctender, sensitive, and true.\u201d

After completing his MFA, Lovett lived with his wife Janice and daughter Jordan in England for six months, becoming closely connected to the village of Kingham, Oxfordshire. Ten years later, he and his wife purchased the cottage they had rented in 1997 and renovated it. They now spend about 6\u20138 week a year in Kingham, and have traveled extensively throughout the UK. His experiences in England are the basis for several of his novels.

For eleven\xa0years, beginning in 2001, Lovett served as Writer-in-Residence at Summit School in Winston-Salem, NC. He wrote\xa0plays for elementary and middle school students, nineteen\xa0of which have been published, including,\xa0Twinderella, which was chosen from over 750 entries as winner of the Shubert Fendrich Playwriting Award. His plays have been seen in over 5000 productions in all fifty states and more than 20 foreign countries. Lovett often makes author visits to schools to see productions, talk with students, and hold master classes.

Lovett\u2019s break-through as a fiction writer came when he combined two of his passions\u2014rare books and the English countryside\u2014to write the Shakespearean mystery\xa0The Bookman\u2019s Tale\xa0(Viking/Penguin, 2013), a\xa0New York Times\xa0bestseller and Barnes and Noble Recommends selection which has been translated into several foreign languages.\xa0Parade Magazine\xa0called the book \u201c[A] delightful tale\xa0of love and bibliophilia.\u201d\xa0His next novel,\xa0First Impressions\xa0(Viking/Penguin, 2014)\xa0was another literary adventure, this one starring Jane Austen.\xa0People Magazine\xa0called it \u201ca delightful novel that weaves together a modern love story\xa0and a literary mystery involving Jane Austen.\u201d

In 2015 Lovett curated a major exhibition called\xa0Alice Live!\xa0at the New York Public Library for Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and wrote the introduction to the new Penguin Books edition of\xa0Alice in Wonderland. 2015 also saw the publication of his Christmas book,\xa0The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge\xa0(Viking/Penguin) which\xa0USA Today\xa0called \u201c[a] clever, merry, and, yes, convincingly Dickensian reimagining of this Victorian tale.\u201d

Lovett\u2019s\xa0 novel\xa0The Lost Book of the Grail\xa0(Viking/Penguin, 2017) is set in an English cathedral library, reaches through centuries of English history, and tells the story of bibliophile and Holy Grail enthusiast\xa0Arthur Prescott as he works to uncover a secret about the cathedral\u2019s history.\xa0Bustle\xa0called it \u201cThe one book every bibliophile needs to read.\u201d

Lovett\u2019s most recent novel,\xa0Escaping Dreamland\xa0(Blackstone, 2020), is a book about four authors in New York City. Much of the book is set in the early 20th\xa0century, and explores not just historic New York, but the lives of three young people writing series books for children (think\xa0The Hardy Boys\xa0and\xa0Nancy Drew). The book is an homage to the books of our childhood, to New York City, and above all to love and friendship.

Lovett\u2019s middle grade adventure,\xa0The Book of the Seven Spells\xa0(Month 9, 2021), about four children who discover a magical library, will come out in the spring and he is currently working on the second volume in that series.

When not visiting his cottage in Kingham, Charlie Lovett lives in Winston-Salem with his wife Janice. They have two grown children, Jordan and Jimmy.