2024 Recipient: Ben Fountain
Ben Fountain's work has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, the PEN/Cerulli Award for Excellence in Sports Writing, and a Whiting Award, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His novel BILLY LYNN'S LONG HALFTIME WALK was adapted for film by three-time Oscar winner Ang Lee, and his short stories and nonfiction have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, Harper's, The Paris Review, Esquire, the Guardian, Le Monde (France), Reporto Sexto Piso (Mexico), and Intranqui'illites (Haiti), among other places. He lives in Dallas, and is a former attorney in private practice.
Join us for the Meet the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Winner Virtual Event.
Honored, elated, grateful, I’m feeling all of these emotions on being awarded the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, in addition to keen anticipation at the prospect of engaging this fall with the extraordinary community of writers, teachers, and readers that New Literary Project has created since its founding in 2015. I offer heartfelt thanks to New Literary Project for this award, and to its far-seeing supporters, its Board of Directors, and the University of California, Berkeley, as well as to the incomparable Joyce Carol Oates, whose extraordinary body of work and spirited career as a teacher and arts advocate encourage us all to do more and better in our own lives. To my fellow finalists Jamel Brinkley, Patricia Engel, Idra Novey, and Bennett Sims, it’s an honor to be in your company. Thank you for the wonderful books you’ve given us so far, and I look forward to all the fine and useful books you will be giving us in the coming years. At a time when fantasy and delusion threaten to overwhelm so much in our lives, we need, more than ever, the hard-won clarity and wisdom that only the best novels and short stories can provide. We—writers of fiction—have our work cut out for us, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize is a tremendous encouragement to me as I continue with my own.
Ben Fountain
Ben Fountain writes in the great tradition of such predecessors as Joseph Conrad, Graham Green, Robert Stone and Russell Banks: richly detailed portraits of individuals whose public and private lives conjoin, often with tragic results. His work, like theirs, is fundamentally moral, even visionary; saturated with irony, yet not devoid of sympathy. Devil Makes Three is a monumental achievement spanning, not historical time, but the consequences of history impinging upon the present. Is there a spiritual connection, a subterranean causality, between the nightmare of political chaos, anarchy and bloodshed in Haiti, and the death of a once-beautiful undersea reef turned “bleached cadaver gray…(like) Chernobyl”; a connection between naive American entrepreneurs, clandestine CIA operatives, and “zombification” of a people—“malnutrition, lead poisoning, physical or emotional abuse”? Fountain’s obvious love for his subject is not qualified by a failure to fully engage its complexities and compromises. Devil Makes Three is evocative too of such knowledgeable thrillers as those of John Le Carre, combining social criticism, political psychodrama, and, not least, subplots of romantic intrigue. Ben Fountain illuminates the extraordinary darkness, violence, and intrigue of Haiti, exhibiting not only a telling grasp of the powerful forces that erupt into chaos, but the psychological and emotional costs of individuals swept up in turmoil beyond their control and comprehension. This is a remarkable work of immense ambition and substance; it is expansive, yet lyric; a feat of geopolitical history. Ben Fountain's characters are never caricatures but reflections of individuals as nuanced, ambivalent, guiltily innocent or innocently guilty as ourselves.”
Joyce Carol Oates
Our 2024 Prize Recipient has written about empathy, ‘the experience, in a profound as opposed to passing sense, of standing in someone else’s shoes. Fiction, when it’s doing its proper work, is an enlargement rather than a reduction of life; an enlargement of self, if we’re open to it. Then there are the books . . . that pick us up, crack us open, and set us down in a different place. We aren’t the same as we were before. We’ve had an experience that scorched our information circuits to smoking crisps.’ Welcome to Downtown Ben Fountain. We sense enlargement on that breathtaking scale across the span of this mid-career author’s short stories, novels, and nonfiction. And we feel intensely attuned to his engagement with the largest, most urgent issues of our times, as he continually sets us down in what is indeed ‘a different place,’ this writer’s place of commitment, intelligence, integrity, and love. Now his most recent novel, the magisterial Devil Makes Three, takes us into the troubled island of Haiti, while also taking us into the troubled islands inside ourselves. He has said that he went to Haiti looking for the past and found, ominously enough, the future instead. This is a heartbreaking, mind-stretching narrative excursion that we deny only to our detriment. But taking that journey along with his richly developed, complex characters, we are invited, and also even challenged, to address the moral, social, and political exigencies of life today, in Haiti of course, but also critically in America. With New Literary Project, we often speak to our bedrock mission to promote a literate, democratic society. With our admiration, and to our everlasting gratitude, so does Ben Fountain, unflinchingly, everywhere, and always.
Joseph Di Prisco
Founding Chair, New Literary Project
What a thrill to discover that Ben Fountain has won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize! Ben's rich, finely-tuned, often quite funny and deeply moral work interrogates America and Americans' place in the world in a manner that has become all the more prescient as his career progresses. His fiction is bold and emotionally charged but wrought with all the care of a master craftsman. Across short stories, trenchant satire, and expansive plots, Ben's work shows his commitment to humanity in all its expansiveness and his deep respect for real knowledge, even in a world that would have us turn away from both of these things. I'm consistently astonished by the profundity of Ben's literary imagination and his devotion to being a fiction writer in conversation with a larger community. I’m beyond excited that he has been recognized with this richly deserved honor.
Megan Lynch
SVP & Publisher, Flatiron Books