Friday, March 18, 2011

Deborah Eisenberg wins 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

Deborah Eisenberg won the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her work THE COLLECTED STORIES OF DEBORAH EISENBERG (Picador). The honored book combines four volumes of Eisenberg's work: Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Under the 82nd Airborne, All Around Atlantis, and Twilight of the Superheroes. Twilight of the Superheroes was a PEN/Faulkner finalist in 2007.

Deborah Eisenberg was born in 1945, and grew up in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka. She went to boarding school and to college in Vermont, and in the 1960s moved to New York City where she received her B.A. at the New School. She now teaches at the University of Virginia.

The PEN/Faulkner Award is the largest peer juried-prize for fiction in the United States. Three judges considered about 320 novels and short story collections by American authors published in the US during the 2010 calendar year. As winner, Eisenberg receives $15,000. One of the judges, Laura Furman says, "From the first to the last of her collected stories, Deborah Eisenberg demonstrates her sharp intelligence, literary inventiveness, and her clear understanding of human interconnectedness as it exists in isolation." Each of the four finalists, Jennifer Egan for A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD (Knopf), Jaimy Gordon for LORD OF MISRULE (McPherson & Co.), Eric Puchner for MODEL HOME (Scribner), and Brad Watson for ALIENS IN THE PRIME OF THEIR LIVES (W.W. Norton) receives $5,000.

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