Anthony Doerr’s novels include About Grace (2004) and All the Light We Cannot See (2014), which won a Pulitzer Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. In Rome he will work on a book set in fifteenth-century Constantinople, the present day, and the future. “All I need is a desk and a window—and maybe some caffeine,” said the Idaho-based writer, adding that because “part of the ending of the novel will take place in Urbino, I’m sure I’ll try to get up there.”

A 2005 Fellow in literature, Doerr published a short memoir about his time at the Academy, titled Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World, when he shared Apartment 5B with his wife Shauna and two newborn sons. “Now our twins will be fifteen years old, and I’m deeply grateful for the chance to bring them back—even for a short time—into the fountainhead of ideas and creativity that is AAR.”