BREAKING IN

Debut authors: How they did it, what they learned, and why you can do it, too.

- BY MORIAH RICHARD

Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita

Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First-Century Life

Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First-Century Life (Nonfiction, November, Avid Reader Press) WRITES FROM: Halfway between Madrid (Spain) and New York. PRE-CONVENT: We like to think that the seed of Convent Wisdom was planted the night we first met in August 2016. We weren't the only prospective graduate students visiting Brown University that summer, but we were the only two matching our very specific freak: a passion for the lives and texts of 16th and 17th-century nuns. That night, we knew that we would spend years of sleepless nights trying to reduce our fascination for nuns to the rigid formulas of academic writing.

Once we started writing, we finished Convent Wisdom in about a year. But we had been researching, first separately and then together, for more than a decade. Our agent found us! She had been listening to our podcast for a while, and she had the feeling that we may have an idea for a book.

When we received all the offers at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2023—nine countries plus an auction between seven U.S. publishing houses—we were shocked. It was both a huge surprise and a well-deserved confirmation that our intuition was right: In the crumbling 21st century we live in, we all need a portable convent to find solace.