PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction
The PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award is given for a novel or book of short stories by an American author who has not previously published a book of fiction.
The late Mary Hemingway, a member of PEN, founded the award in 1976 both to honor the memory of her husband, Ernest Hemingway, and to recognize distinguished first books of fiction. The award is funded by the Ernest Hemingway Foundation, which has been administered by the Hemingway Society since 1987, and PEN New England. In addition to $10,000, the winner also receives a one-week residency in The Distinguished Visiting Writers Series at the University of Idaho’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. In addition, the winner and competition finalists and honorable mentions receive Ucross Residency Fellowships at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, a retreat for artists and writers. A panel of three distinguished fiction writers selects the winner. Read more news here.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Guidelines and submission forms for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction will be available for download in August.
The 2013 Winner is Kevin Powers
Kevin Powers was born and raised in Richmond, VA. In 2004 and 2005 he served with the U.S. Army in Mosul and Tal Afar, Iraq. He studied English at Virginia Commonwealth University after his honorable discharge and received an M.F.A. in Poetry from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin in 2012. His novel The Yellow Birds (Little, Brown) was a National Book Award finalist and is this year's Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award winner for debut fiction. Writing for the New York Times, Ben Percy asserts that, with The Yellow Birds,
Kevin Powers has something to say, something deeply moving about the frailty of man and the brutality of war, and we should all lean closer and listen.
The finalists for 2013 are Jennifer duBois for A Partial History of Lost Causes (Dial Press) and Vaddey Ratner for In the Shadow of the Banyan Tree (Simon & Schuster). The honorable mentions are Catherine Chung for Forgotten Country (Riverhead Books) and Peter M. Wheelwright for As It Is On Earth (Fomite Press).