SHERMAN ALEXIE’S ‘WAR DANCES’ WINS 2010 PEN/Faulkner AWARD
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March 23, 2010
Washington, DC—Sherman Alexie’s War Dances (Grove Press) has been selected as the winner of the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The announcement was made today by the directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, Susan Richards Shreve and Robert Stone, Co-Chairmen.
The judges—Rilla Askew, Kyoko Mori, and Al Young—considered close to 350 novels and short story collections by American authors published in the US during the 2009 calendar year. Submissions came from over 90 publishing houses, including small and academic presses. There is no fee for a publisher to submit a book.
The honored book, War Dances, is a collection of structurally inventive pieces on the themes of love, betrayal, familial relationships, race, and class. The stories are interspersed with poems which refract their themes or topics. About this collection judge Al Young says, “War Dances taps every vein and nerve, every tissue, every issue that quickens the current blood-pulse: parenthood, divorce, broken links, sex, gender and racial conflict, substance abuse, medical neglect, 9/11, Official Narrative vs. What Really Happened, settler religion vs. native spirituality; marketing, shopping, and war, war, war. All the heartbreaking ways we don’t live now—this is the caring, eye-opening beauty of this rollicking, bittersweet gem of a book.”
Winner of a 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, and additional honors including, most recently, the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award, Sherman Alexie is the author of four novels, three prior short story collections, numerous books of poetry, documentaries, and films. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
The PEN/Faulkner Award is America’s largest peer juried prize for fiction in the United States. As winner, Alexie receives $15,000. Each of the four finalists—Barbara Kingsolver for The Lacuna (Harper); Lorraine M. López for Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories (BkMk Press); Lorrie Moore for A Gate at The Stairs (Knopf); and Colson Whitehead for Sag Harbor (Doubleday) —receives $5,000.
All five authors will be honored during the 30th anniversary PEN/Faulkner Award Ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library, located at 201 East Capitol Street, SE, on Saturday, May 8, 2010 at 7:00 p.m.
Tickets are $100, and can be purchased by phoning
the Folger Box Office at 202. 544.7077,
or online at www.folger.edu/penfaulkneraward
The PEN/Faulkner Award was first given in 1981. Past winners include last year’s winner Joseph O’Neill and E.L. Doctorow, Ann Patchett, Philip Roth, John Updike, and John Edgar Wideman, among others. A full list of winners is at
http://www.penfaulkner.org/award_for_fiction.php
The PEN/Faulkner Foundation is committed to building audiences for exceptional literature and bringing writers together with their readers. This mission is accomplished through a reading series at Folger Shakespeare Library by distinguished writers who have won the respect of readers and writers alike; the PEN/Faulkner Award, the largest peer-juried award for fiction in the United States; the PEN/Malamud Award, honoring excellence in the short story; and the Writers in Schools program, which brings nationally and internationally-acclaimed authors to public high school classrooms in Washington, DC, Atlanta, and Kansas City.
For More Information, visit www.penfaulkner.org
WAR DANCES reviewed at BlogClogCritics along with a meaningful discussion of Alexie’s gift
Sherman Alexie’s website
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