Brenda Webster was born in New York City, educated at Swarthmore College, Columbia University, and University of California, Berkeley, where she earned her Ph.D. She is a freelance writer, critic, and translater who splits her time between Berkeley and Rome, and she is the current president of PEN West. Webster has written two controversial and oft-anthologized critical studies, Yeats: A Psychoanalytic Study (Stanford University Press) and Blake's Prophetic Psychology (Macmillan), and translated poetry from the Italian for The Other Voice (Norton) and The Penguin Book of Women Poets. She is co-editor of the journals of the abstract expressionist painter (and Webster's mother) Ethel Schwabacher, Hungry for Light: The Journal of Ethel Schwabacher (Indiana, 1993). She is the author of two previous novels, Sins of the Mothers (Baskerville, 1993) and Paradise Farm (SUNY, 1999), and a memoir, The Last Good Freudian (Holmes and Meier, 2000). The Modern Language Association recently accepted for publication Webster's translation of Edith Bruck's Holocaust novel Lettera alla Madre. Brenda Webster's next novel, Vienna Triangle will be out with WINGS Press in January, 2009 and explores Freud's role in the death of his brilliant disciple.

Webster has been nominated for two 26th Annual 2007 Northern California Book Awards. Fiction:The Beheading Game by Brenda Webster. Translation: Letter to My Mother by Edith Bruck, translated by Brenda Webster.