Before he started writing he had worked as an English teacher.

His father, Murray Guterson, is a distinguished criminal defense lawyer. "One of the things I heard from him was to find something you love to do – before you think about money or anything else. The other thing was to do something that you feel has a positive impact on the world."

Now he lives with his family on a little Puget Sound on the north west coast in the USA; it is also the setting of his first novel and his first bestseller Snow Falling On Cedars .

The author has also written the non-fictional book Family Matters - Why Home-Schooling Makes Sense and the short story collection The Country Ahead Of Us, The Country Behind. Guterson wrote these stories before his novel, and now when he looks at them, he feels "removed from them to the degree I feel removed from who I was in my twenties when I wrote them. The stories reflect my concerns at that time. Snow Falling On Cedars is the work of someone in his thirties."

David Guterson received a Pen/Faulkner Award for his work Snow Falling On Cedars in 1995.

Najat S. & Sandra M.