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Pinckney Benedict


Pinckney Benedict grew up on his family's dairy farm in the mountains of southern West Virginia. He received his Bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1986 and his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1988. His stories and non-fiction have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including Ontario Review, Italy's Grazia, Japan's Gunzo, New Stories from the South, and The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. He has published two collections of short fiction, Town Smokes (Ontario Review Press, 1987) and The Wrecking Yard (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 1992) and most recently a novel, Dogs of God (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 1994). All three were named Notable Books by the New York Times Book Review. They have been or will soon be published in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.

Town Smokes will be published in Catalan in October 1997 by Documenta Balear. (With kind permission from Ontario Review Press and Documenta Balear, The Barcelona Review will publish a selection from Town Smokes in its October 1st issue in the original English along with the Catalan translation, and, for the first time, a Spanish translation.)

Pinckney Benedict is the recipient of many awards, including Britain's Steinbeck Award, the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award, inclusion in the Pushcart Prize XXI anthology (he is a Contributing Editor to the Pushcart series), the short-list for the Hammett Award for Excellence in Crime Writing, and two of the Henfield Foundation's Transatlantic Review Awards.

His plays -- one-acts, full-length, and a musical -- have received staged readings and performances at the Greenbrier Valley Theatre in Lewisburg, West Virginia. Several of his short stories have been adapted for short films and television in America and Europe; He has just completed a feature-length screenplay, an adaptation of Four Days by Canadian novelist John Buell, for OB & D Films, Toronto. Currently he is writing the screenplay for Dogs of God for Gerard de Thame Films, London.

He has taught in the Creative Writing Programs at Ohio State University, Oberlin College, and Princeton University. He is currently an associate professor in the English Department at Hope College in Holland, Michigan; he teaches summer courses at The Hill.

See also:

review of Town Smokes in The Richmond Review

Pinckney Benedict's homepage (includes selections of his work)

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