Alice Hoffman
Alice Hoffman is an American writer born on March 16, 1952, in New York City. She writes novels for adults, teens, and children, often using magic and fantasy. Her most famous book is Practical Magic (1995), which was turned into a 1998 film and helped start a larger media thing around her work. Many of her stories mix magic with irony and complex relationships.
Hoffman grew up on Long Island, and her grandmother was a Russian-Jewish immigrant. She finished Valley Stream North High School in 1969, earned a BA from Adelphi University, and got an MA in creative writing from Stanford, where she was a Mirrielees Fellow in 1973–74. When she was 21, her first short story, "At the Drive-In," appeared in a literary magazine, and she began her first novel, Property Of, published in 1977.
Her career includes work for Doubleday, and she has won awards like the New Jersey Notable Book Award for Ice Queen and the Hammett Prize for Turtle Moon. She also wrote the screenplay for a 1983 film called Independence Day.
In 2019 she published The World That We Knew, inspired by a true story about hidden Jewish children in World War II. Her novel Magic Lessons (2020) is a prequel to Practical Magic, focusing on Maria Owens. Hoffman has written Scholastic novels Indigo, Green Angel, and Green Witch, and with her son Wolfe Martin, the picture book Moondog. In 2015 she donated her archives to Adelphi University. She lives in Boston and helped start the Hoffman Breast Center after breast cancer treatment.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 11:14 (CET).