Lannan Foundation

Chris Abani

Chris Abani’s novels are GraceLand (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004) and Masters of the Board (Delta, 1985). His poetry collections include Dog Woman (Red Hen, Fall 2004), Daphne’s Lot (Red Hen, 2003), and Kalakuta Republic (Saqi, 2001).

He teaches in the MFA Program at Antioch University, Los Angeles and is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside. A Middleton Fellow at the University of Southern California, he is the recipient of the 2001 PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the 2001 Prince Claus Award and a 2003 Lannan Literary Fellowship.

Chris Abani Bio and Cross Links

Daniel Alarcón

Daniel Alarcón’s fiction and nonfiction have been published in The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, Harper’s and elsewhere. He is Associate Editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning monthly magazine based in his native Lima, Peru. His story collection, War by Candlelight, was a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award. The British journal Granta recently named him one of the Best Young American Novelists. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship (2001), a Whiting Award (2004), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007). He lives in Oakland, California, and his first novel, Lost City Radio, was published in February 2007.

Daniel Alarcón Bio and Cross Links

A. R. Ammons

Nadeem Aslam

Nadeem Aslam was born in Pakistan and immigrated with his family to Great Britain at the age of fourteen. He now lives in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, in northern England.

His first novel, Season of the Rainbirds, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Best First Novel Award and the Mail on Sunday/John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize; it won the Betty Trask Award and the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award. It was also on the longlist for the Booker Prize. His second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers, was awarded the Kiriyama Prize in fiction and the British Society of Author’s 2005 Encore Prize for best second novel. He is currently at work on a third novel, about America’s war on terror.

Nadeem Aslam Bio and Cross Links

John Banville

John Berger

Louis de Bernières

Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry is a poet, essayist, and novelist, who has been called the “prophet of rural America.” Mr. Berry, who pursues what he calls “an ethic and way of life based upon devotion to a place and devotion to a land,” lives and works on his farm in Port Royal, Kentucky.

He has published more than 30 books, including The Wheel, Sabbaths, and Openings (poetry); The Wild Birds, Watch with Me, and Remembering (fiction); and Another Turn of the Crank, What Are People For?, and The Unsettling of America (nonfiction).

He received a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction in 1989.

Wendell Berry Bio and Cross Links

Eavan Boland

Eavan Boland explores the relationship between gender, art, and national identity in her work. She was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1944 and educated in London, New York and Dublin.

Her most recent book of poetry, Against Love Poems, concerns marriage and “the stoicism of dailyness” she explains. Of writing poetry she says,”I don’t write a poem to express an experience. I write it to experience the experience.”

Boland first read for the Readings & Conversations series in 1994 and was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry that year. A regular reviewer for the Irish Times, she has been a professor of English at Stanford University since 1995, and serves as the Director of Stanford’s Creative Writing Center.

Eavan Boland Bio and Cross Links

Kay Boyle