Peter Cameron, a 1982 Hamilton graduate, has been named a 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award nominee. Cameron's book, The City of Your Final Destination (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), was among five books selected as finalists for the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, America s largest peer-juried prize for fiction. The winner will be announced in April.
In The City of Your Final Destination, a naive young grad student travels to a crumbling mansion in Uruguay seeking authorization to write the biography of a suicidal novelist. With echoes of Henry James and Oscar Wilde, the novel is about people in perpetual emotional transit, the random nature of love, and the ways in which we confront or avoid life s choices. The author of three other novels, including Andorra and The Weekend, and three story collections, Cameron teaches in the graduate writing program at Sarah Lawrence and lives in New York City.
The judges Gail Godwin, Valerie Martin, and Alexs Pate considered approximately 357 novels and short story collections published in the U.S. during the 2002 calendar year from over 90 publishing houses, including small and academic presses.
The winner, who will receive $15,000, will be announced in April; the four finalists will receive $5000 each. All five authors will be honored during the 23rd Annual PEN/Faulkner Award ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.
The PEN/Faulkner Award was first given in 1981. Past winners are Walter Abish, David Bradley, Toby Olson, Tobias Wolff, Peter Taylor, Richard Wiley, T. Coraghessan Boyle, James Salter, E.L. Doctorow, John Edgar Wideman (1984 and 1991), Don DeLillo, E. Annie Proulx, David Guterson, Richard Ford, Gina Berriault, Rafi Zabor, Michael Cunningham, Ha Jin, Philip Roth (1994 and 2001), and Ann Patchett.
The PEN/Faulkner Foundation is committed to building audiences for quality literature and bringing writers together with their readers. This mission is accomplished through readings at the Folger by distinguished writers who have won the respect of readers and writers alike; the PEN/Faulkner Award, the largest juried award for fiction in the United States; the PEN/Malamud Award, honoring excellence in the short story; and the Writers in Schools program, which brings nationally and internationally-acclaimed authors to public high school classrooms in Washington and other cities, to discuss their work with the students.
