Bache, Ellyn

Ellyn Bache, writer of Wilmington, N.C., grew up in Washington, D.C., and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the mid-1960s. She has published non-fiction under the pen name Ellen Matthews, and, with her husband, young adult fiction under the pen name E.M.J. Benjamin. Much of Bache's writing is set in southern locales and deals with race relations and southern culture in general.

Author Ellyn Bache grew up in Washington, D.C., attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the mid-1960s, and made her home in Maryland until moving back to North Carolina in 1985.

Initially a freelance journalist, Bache published at least 40 short stories in magazines such as McCall's, Woman's World, Virginia Country, The Antietam Review, and Woman (England). She also published numerous articles in newspapers such as the Washington Post, the Sun-Times, the Washington Star, the Sun Magazine, and the Morning Herald . Her novel, The Activist's Daughter (Spinster's Ink, 1997), is set amid the racial unrest of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill during 1963. Another novel, Safe Passage (Crown, 1988) was developed for the screen and released to theaters in 1995. Her novel, Festival in Fire Season (August House, 1992), is set in a fictionalized Wilmington/Wrightville Beach, N.C., and deals with, among other things, the Azalea Festival and the fires that ravaged southeast North Carolina in 1986. Sixteen of her short stories were collected in The Value of Kindness (Helicon Nine Editions, 1993), which won the 1992 Willa Cather Fiction Prize. She also published non-fiction under the pen name Ellen Matthews. Under the pen name E. M. J. Benjamin, she published, with the help of her husband, Takedown (Banks Channel Books, 1999), a young adult novel. Bache's plays include Writer's Bloc, a musical comedy in two acts, which she co-authored with Joyce Cooper and Patricia Ruark.

Bache won several awards in addition to the Willa Cather Prize. She was honored in 1987 by Writers and Readers and, in 1989, by the North Carolina Fiction Syndicate. She also won first place in the Charlotte Writer's Club short story contest in 1987 and was a winner in the 1989 O. Henry Festival Competition.