Tara Westerver

Tara Westover (born September 27, 1986) is an American memoirist and historian best known for her internationally acclaimed memoir Educated (2018). Born in Clifton, Idaho, she was raised in a survivalist Mormon family that distrusted public institutions, so she never attended school as a child and was kept away from doctors and hospitals. She spent her early years working in her father's junkyard and helping her mother, an unlicensed midwife and herbalist.

Determined to educate herself, Westover taught herself mathematics and grammar, studied for the ACT, and was admitted to Brigham Young University at seventeen—her first experience in a classroom. She went on to earn a Gates Cambridge Scholarship and completed a PhD in history at Trinity College, Cambridge, spending time as a visiting fellow at Harvard along the way.

Her only full-length book, Educated, chronicles her remarkable journey from isolation in the mountains of Idaho to Cambridge University, exploring themes of memory, family loyalty, and the transformative power of education. The memoir became a 1 New York Times bestseller, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, has been translated into more than forty languages, and was recommended by Barack Obama. Westover was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in 2019.