St Francis College, 180 Remsen Street in Brooklyn Heights, announced last week that it has whittled down from 187 submissions to a shortlist of six award-winning authors to receive the 2017 St. Francis College $50,000 Literary Prize, one of the richest literary prizes in the country.
The authors are:
- Amina Gautier, The Loss of All Lost Things (Elixir Press)
- Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (Riverhead Books)
- Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown and Company)
- Selah Saterstrom, Slab (Coffee House Press)
- Dana Spiotta, Innocents and Others (Scribner)
- Deb Olin Unferth, With Till You See Me Dance (Graywolf Press)
The prize seeks to draw attention to mid-career writers at a time when the support of publishers, publications, and fans often wanes.
“At this time in their careers, many writers are developing their strongest voice, and publishing their best work,” said St. Francis College English Professor Ian Maloney, Director of the St. Francis CollegeLiterary Prize. “The problem is support for mid-career authors doesn’t match the quality of their work. We want to raise awareness of these great writers at this critical point in their careers.”
With the number of authors cut to six, the Jury Prize members; Ellen Litman (The Last Chicken in America), Jeffery Renard Allen (Song of the Shank), and René Steinke (Friendswood), will now decide on the winner, which will be announced as part of the Brooklyn Book Festival, held September 17.
“I’ve spent the past six months reading (and re-reading) so many amazing and excellent books. It was exciting to have the chance to survey this moment in contemporary fiction, and thrilling to discover how much spectacular writing there is right now,” said Steinke. “A lot of the books we’ve read deserve more recognition, and it was painful to have to settle on a short list. But each of these six books is fantastic in its own way, and I hope this recognition will bring them many more readers.”
The $50,000 Literary Prize compliments the programming at St. Francis College which brings a number of high-profile and rising star authors to campus every year through the Walt Whitman Writers Series and with the new Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing featuring mentors, Marlon James (A Brief History of Seven Killings) and Annie Finch (Spells: New and Selected Poems). More Information at sfc.edu/mfa.
About the Short List Authors
Photo credit: Dayo Nicole Mitchell
Amina Gautier is the author of three award-winning short story collections: The Loss of All Lost Things, Now We Will Be Happy, and At-Risk. More than eighty-five of her short stories have been published and reprinted extensively. Gautier has been the recipient of the Crazyhorse Prize, the Danahy Fiction Prize, the Jack Dyer Prize, the William Richey Prize, the Schlafly Microfiction Award, and the Lamar York Prize in Fiction. A graduate of Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Gautier has taught at a number of universities. She is a native New Yorker who currently divides her time between Chicago and Miami.
Mohsin Hamid is the internationally bestselling author of Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Discontent and its Civilizations, and Exit West. His award-winning novels have been adapted for the cinema, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and translated into more than thirty languages. His essays and short stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker, among many other publications. Hamid now resides in Lahore, his birthplace, after living for a number of years in New York and London.
Adam Haslett is the author of the short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here, which was a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist; the novel Union Atlantic, winner of the Lambda Literary Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize; and his most recent, the novel Imagine Me Gone. A graduate of Swarthmore College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Yale Law School, he has been a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Columbia University.
Selah Saterstrom is the author of the novels Slab, The Meat and Spirit Plan, and The Pink Institution, all published by Coffee House Press. Widely published and anthologized, she is also the author of Tiger Goes to the Dogs, a limited edition letterpress project published by Nor By Press. She teaches and lectures across the United States and is the Director of Creative Writing at the University of Denver.
Dana Spiotta is the author of Innocents and Others; Stone Arabia, A National Books Critics Circle Award finalist; and Eat the Document, a finalist for the National Book Award and a recipient of the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and Lightning Field (2001). Spiotta was a Guggenheim Fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and won the 2008-9 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. She lives in Syracuse and teaches in the Syracuse University MFA program.
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of the collection of stories Minor Robberies, the novel Vacation, and the memoir, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, which was a finalist for a 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, NOON,the Paris Review, and Tin House. She lives in Austin, Texas. For more than ten years, Deb Olin Unferth has been publishing startlingly askew, wickedly comic, cutting-edge fiction in magazines such as Granta, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, NOON, and the Paris Review.
