Although Daniel Wallace was born in Birmingham, Alabama, his life as a writer has been shaped almost entirely in North Carolina. He moved to Chapel Hill in the early 1980s and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he studied writing with several distinguished faculty members, including fellow North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame inductees Lee Smith and Bland Simpson.
After graduating from UNC, Wallace remained in Chapel Hill, working in local bookstores and co-directing the Orange County Literacy Council, while writing fiction at night and on weekends. He later returned to his alma mater and, in 2008, joined the creative writing faculty at UNC–Chapel Hill, where he is currently the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Creative Writing Program.
His first published novel was Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions (Algonquin Books, 1998). The novel, which blends Southern storytelling traditions with myth, humor, and emotional truth, gained a wide readership and was later adapted into a feature film directed by Tim Burton. In 2013, Big Fish was adapted into a musical that ran on Broadway and in London’s West End. Wallace has often noted that one of the most gratifying aspects of the book’s long life has been seeing it performed by high school and community theater groups and speaking with students and young writers about the power of storytelling.
Through the legendary stories of protagonist Edward Bloom and his son’s search for the truth behind them, Big Fish introduced readers to Wallace’s distinctive voice—one that connects the deeply relatable stories of families and everyday life with myth, magical realism, memory, and imagination.
Wallace continued to explore these themes in a series of novels including Ray in Reverse, The Watermelon King, Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician, Extraordinary Adventures, and The Kings and Queens of Roam.
In recent years Wallace has taken his work in new directions. In 2023 he published the memoir This Isn’t Going to End Well (Algonquin), followed by his first collection of short fiction, Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars (Bull City Press, 2025). Author M. Randal O’Wain wrote of the collection that Wallace’s stories “are no less tender and joyful than his previous work… exploring the vast emotional terrain of what it means to be messily and beautifully human.”
Wallace has also written essays, profiles, and interviews for publications including The Bitter Southerner, Garden & Gun, Poets & Writers, and Our State, where he briefly served as the magazine’s barbecue critic. In addition, he wrote and illustrated the children’s book The Cat’s Pajamas.
His fiction has received numerous honors. Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician received the Sir Walter Raleigh Prize for Fiction, awarded annually to the best work of fiction by a North Carolina author. In 2019 Wallace received the Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer of the Year, and in 2022 he was inducted into the Alabama Literary Hall of Fame.
Each and every one of Wallace’s novels, stories, essays, and drawings has been written in Chapel Hill, where he continues to live and work with his wife of twenty-five years, Laura.
See a list of Daniel Wallace’s books.
Read “The Ladder” by Daniel Wallace.
MEDIA
Preview of Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions
https://books.google.com/books?id=7i4pu6gx53sC
Most quoted from Big Fish:
“A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him, and in that way he becomes immortal.”
— Daniel Wallace, Big Fish
Selected essays by Daniel Wallace
The Bitter Southerner – https://bittersoutherner.com
Garden & Gun – https://gardenandgun.com
Poets & Writers – https://www.pw.org
“The Art of Storytelling” – Author talk (video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7RyeDghJMQ
Interview about Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars – Southern Review of Books
“When I sit down to write, I have no idea what’s going to happen. I sit down and type and see where it goes… There’s joy in the not knowing…”
https://southernreviewofbooks.com/2025/05/20/beneath-the-moon-and-long-dead-stars-daniel-wallace-interview/