Ben Fountain
Ben Fountain (born 1958, Chapel Hill, North Carolina) is an American fiction writer currently living in Dallas, Texas. He has won many awards including a PEN/Hemingway award for Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories (2007) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for his debut novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2012).
Contents
Pre-writing career
Fountain grew up in Elizabeth City, a tobacco town in eastern North Carolina. His family moved to Cary, near Raleigh, when he was 13. Fountain earned a B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1980, and a law degree from the Duke University School of Law in 1983.[1] After a brief stint practicing real estate law at Akin Gump in Dallas, Fountain quit law in 1988 to become a full-time fiction writer.[2]
Writing career
While collecting articles about things he was interested in, Fountain was riveted by Haiti, regarding it "like a laboratory, almost ... Everything that’s gone on in the last five hundred years—colonialism, race, power, politics, ecological disasters—it’s all there in very concentrated form. And also I just felt, viscerally, pretty comfortable there." Speaking little French, let alone Haitian Creole, he went for his first trip abroad there in 1991 and at least thirty more times. From this came four of the best regarded stories in his 2006 breakthrough collection of short stories: Brief Encounters With Che Guevara; a late bloomer, he was forty-eight.[3][2] He has won numerous awards and inclusion of his work in New Stories from the South: The Year's Best (2006).[4] [5]
Fountain's latest novel, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, was released in early May 2012.[4][5] The Oscar-winning screenwriter of Slumdog Millionaire, Simon Beaufoy, is adapting the novel into a screenplay, a new Film4 project in collaboration with The Ink Factory, a U.S. production company. Ang Lee is attached to direct it.[6][7] Filming began in 2015 and the film is scheduled to be released in November 2016.
Personal life
Fountain married Sharon (née Monahan), an attorney, in 1985; they met when both were students at Duke University School of Law. They have two children.[8]
Awards and honors
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- 2002 Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Award[citation needed]
- 2003 Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Award[9]
- 2005 Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Award[9]
- 2004 Pushcart Prize[10]
- 2005 O. Henry Award [11]
- 2006 Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction [12]
- 2007 O. Henry Award[citation needed]
- 2007 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for Brief Encounters with Che Guevara[12]
- 2007 Whiting Award[13]
- 2012 National Book Award (fiction), finalist, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk[14]
- 2012 Specsavers National Book Awards International Author of the Year shortlist for Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk[15][16]
- 2012 Goodreads Readers Choice Awards 2012, Best Fiction finalist for Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk[17]
- 2012 Flaherty-Dunnan Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
- 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award (fiction), Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk[18][19][19]
- 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (fiction), Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk[20][21]
- 2013 Dayton Literary Peace Prize (fiction), runner-up, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk[22]
- 2013 Chautauqua Prize, shortlist, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk[23]
Bibliography
Books
- Brief Encounters With Che Guevara (Ecco, 2006, ISBN 0060885580)
- Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
Short fiction
- "Near-Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera," Zoetrobe: All-Story, Spring 2002
- "The Good Ones Are Already Taken," The Barcelona Review
References
- ↑ "Ben Fountain," Barnes & Noble biography
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- ↑ http://www.nationalbookawards.co.uk/author/ben-fountain/
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- ↑ http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gqyq7TkbdhOrdmC2QRwvH2tsxpOg?docId=d5562e8f80ad4b40b423ea9f41fb3c2c
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External links
- Incomplete lists from November 2012
- Articles with unsourced statements from May 2013
- 1958 births
- 21st-century American novelists
- American male novelists
- American male short story writers
- American short story writers
- Duke University alumni
- Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award winners
- Living people
- People from Dallas, Texas
- People from Chapel Hill, North Carolina
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alumni
