Paul Harding Is a Finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction

Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Harding’s latest novel, This Other Eden, is a National Book Award finalist for fiction. Harding is director of the Creative Writing and Literature MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton and Manhattan and also interim associate provost of Stony Brook’s Lichtenstein Center.

This Other Eden (W.W. Norton) — which has earned praise from The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, and NPR, among others — follows the story of the descendants of a formerly enslaved man on their home, Apple Island, and the missionary who led to their eventual downfall and expulsion from their home.

Harding’s debut novel, Tinkers, was published in 2009 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year, and his second novel, Enon (2013), was named a best novel of the year by The Wall Street Journal and the American Library Association.

Harding is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Harvard University, and Grinnell College before coming to Stony Brook.

Winners will be announced live on Wednesday, November 15, at the invitation-only 74th National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner, in person at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City, and broadcast live for readers everywhere. Register to watch by visiting nationalbook.org/awards.