KHN Resident Amina Gautier PhD wins PEN/Malamud Award

KHN resident writer Amina Gautier PhD has won the prestigious PEN/Malumud award.

A excerpt from May 9, 2018 press release:

"Washington, DC—Joan Silber and Amina Gautier have been selected to receive the 2018 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Given since 1988 in honor of the late Bernard Malamud, this award recognizes a body of work that demonstrates excellence in the art of short fiction. The announcement was made today by the directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and board president Ginny Grenham."

The awardees are honored at an awards ceremony and public reading. They also receive a cash prize.

This write-up from the press release details Gautier's substantial impact in the world of fiction.

"Amina Gautier is a prolific award-winning writer of short fiction. In myriad stories that captivate readers and critics alike, she complicates and illuminates the intersection of self and place, with characters who navigate the pitfalls and pleasures of claiming a complex identity in a world that at times seems to insist on simple answers. As Dolen Perkins-Valdez, a member of the PEN/Malamud selection committee, wrote, 'Amina Gautier’s unwavering commitment to the short story reveals a writer in full control. And the form is the perfect vehicle for her intellect. Like a scientist who takes apart the human body and puts it back together again to understand how it works, Gautier is unafraid to examine heartbreak, but equally comfortable capturing triumph. Her stories, sweeping and elegant, sophisticated and daring, call the mind and heart to attention.' Gautier won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction with her striking debut collection At-Risk (2011), which Karen Rigby wrote was 'not a debut composed of rapid shocks and dangers, but a quieter accumulation of heartbreaking pressures.' She followed that success with the 2014 collection Now We Will Be Happy, described by Coleen Muir in The Rumpus as 'delivering the complexity of the human lives with a voice that is engaging and as richly layered as the world it describes,' and The Loss of All Lost Things in 2016, which Jennifer Bort Yacovissi in the Washington Independent Review of Books called 'A masterful collection of stirring, deceptively simple tales' that speaks 'quietly, powerfully, of the large and small losses in all of our lives.' A native New Yorker raised in Brooklyn, Gautier received her BA and MA in English literature and creative writing from Stanford University, and her MA and PhD in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, she has won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction and the Elixir Press Award in Fiction, among other awards and honors. Over 100 of her stories have appeared in such publications as African American Review, Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review, and Prairie Schooner. She lives in Chicago and Miami."

Amina Gautier was recently awarded a seven-week residency at KHN Center for the Arts and was also awarded a three-week residency in 2014.