March 25, 2007
Hemingway and Winship Award Winners Announced
On Monday, March 5, PEN New England announced that Ben Fountain's book, Brief Encounters With Che Guevara (HarperCollins), has won the 2007 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a distinguished first book of fiction.
The two finalists were Rebecca Johns for Icebergs (Bloomsbury USA) and Yvette Christianse for Unconfessed (Other Press). Two other books received honorable mention: Marisha Pessl for Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Viking) and Janna Levin for A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (Alfred A. Knopf). Judges for the award this year were acclaimed fiction writers Elizabeth Berg, Chang-rae Lee and Sue Miller.
Ben Fountain will receive an $8,000 prize from the Hemingway Foundation and a one week residency in The Distinguished Visiting Writers Series at the University of Idaho’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. Fountain and competition finalists and runners-up receive Ucross Residency Fellowships at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, a retreat for artists and writers.
Patrick Hemingway, the son of Nobel Prize-winning writer Ernest Hemingway will present the award on Sunday, April 1 at 3:00 PM, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Edward P. Jones, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, will serve as the ceremony’s keynote speaker.
The ceremony will also honor writers K.C. Frederick, Louise Gluck, and Sebastian Junger as recipients of the 2007 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Awards, given annually to a New England author or a book with a New England setting. Mr. Frederick is being honored in the fiction category for Inland (Permanent Press); Ms. Gluck in the poetry category for Averno (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); and, Sebastian Junger in the non-fiction category for A Death in Belmont (W.W. Norton). Judges for the Winship Awards this year were authors Rose Moss, Sue Standing, and Bill Roorbach.
The awards ceremony is free and open to the public. Those interested in attending should call the Kennedy Presidential Library at 617.514.1643 to reserve a seat.