Atticus Lish ’93 has been named the winner of the 2015 PEN/Faulkner award, which recognizes works of fiction by American authors.
Preparation for the Next Life tells the love story of a Chinese Muslim immigrant and an Iraq war veteran, who meet at a food court in New York City. Lish—son of Gordon Lish, the editor of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Briggs-Copeland Lecturer Amy Hempel, among others—chose to place his debut novel with the small independent publisher Tyrant Books. The company initially printed a run of only 3,500 paperback copies (still the largest it had ever produced); it had to order an additional 10,000 when the book received high praise in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.
The author dropped out of Harvard two years into his undergraduate career, taking a series of blue-collar jobs and enlisting in the Marines before he returned to the University in his mid thirties; his courses at that time included a fiction workshop. In one sense, however, his writing career began far earlier: Don DeLillo, a friend of his father’s, borrowed an extract from one of Lish’s fourth-grade compositions to end his novel The Names.
Lish and the other four finalists will give readings, and be recognized, at a ceremony on May 2.
