Benjamin Alire Sáenz has won this year’s PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his short story collection, Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club. The judges considered more than 350 novels and short story collections by American authors published during 2012. Finalists included Amelia Gray for her novel Threats ; Laird Hunt, author of Kind One; T. Geronimo Johnson, author of Hold it ‘Til It Hurts ; and Thomas Mallon, author of Watergate. Founded in 1980 by National Book Award winner Mary Lee Settle, the PEN/Faulkner Award was established to recognize literary fiction of excellence juried by writers for writers. The prize was named for William Faulkner, who used his Nobel Prize funds to establish an award for younger writers, and PEN, the international writers’ organization. In addition to this award, Mr. Saenz’s book Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe was honored by the American Library Association this year as the best young adult novel about the Latino cultural experience and the best book about the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender experience. You can read the full article in today’s NYT. And check the EPL catalog for more books by this award-winning author.
Laura
NoViolet Bulawayo is the 2014 winner of the Hemingway Foundation’s PEN Award for her novel We Need New Names. The prize honoring best debut fiction was established in 1976 by Mary Hemingway in memory of her husband Ernest Hemingway. Along with the $10,000 award, the prize includes a one-week residence at the University of Idaho, and a fellowship at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. Born in Zimbabwe in 1981, Ms. Bulawayo is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Read the NYT article here.