Lisa Alther (born July 23, 1944 in Kingsport, Tennessee) is an American author and novelist. Her first name is pronounced as if it were spelled Liza.

She graduated from Wellesley College with a B.A. in English literature in 1966. After a brief time in the publishing industry, she moved to Hinesburg, Vermont to raise her daughter. According to Ms. Alther, she wrote two novels, a host of short stories, and received "hundreds of rejection slips" between age 16 and 30, before Kinflicks was accepted for publication.

Alther is the author of six novels, Kinflicks, Original Sins, Other Women, Bedrock, Five Minutes In Heaven, and Washed in the Blood, as well as a small number of published short stories and many magazine articles.

Nobel laureate Doris Lessing wrote of Kinflicks that Alther was "a strong, salty, original talent."

Time called it an "abundantly entertaining progress through the unsettled 60s" and noted that "as exuberant caricature Kinflicks is authentically inspired"; while the novel "teems with cartoon eccentrics mouthing balloonfuls of inflated nonsense[, u]nhappily, Ginny [the protagonist] is equally one dimensional."

More than 30 years after its publication, Katherine Dieckmann, reviewing the author’s 2007 memoir, also commented on Kinflicks, calling it a "raucous novel [that] was all the rage among my high school set for its lurid paperback cover (nude female back, gilt lettering) and its frank talk of erections and lesbian hook-ups. Revisiting the novel 30 years later, it’s clear the packaging sold the contents short: Alther’s best-known book is a witty coming-of-age tale in which a tart-tongued protagonist named Ginny wanders her way through an identity crisis, mostly against a classic counterculture background."