2024 JCO Prize Winner Announced

And the 2024 JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE WINNER is…

Ben Fountain, of Dallas, Texas, is the Recipient of the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize of $50,000 awarded to a mid-career author of fiction by New Literary Project (NewLit). He is the acclaimed author of Devil Makes Three (Flatiron, 2023) and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, as well as much-honored short stories and nonfiction. A finalist in 2018, he is now the eighth recipient of the annual prize. This year’s prize stands not only as testament to Ben Fountain’s significant accomplishments, but also as encouragement and support for work to come.

“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 the New Literary Project has created since its founding in 2015. I offer heartfelt thanks to the New Literary Project for this award, and to its far-seeing supporters, its Board of Directors, and the University of California at 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.”

—Ben Fountain

Ben will be in residence at UC Berkeley and the Bay Area in late October 2024. Please watch this space for dates.

Join us for a virtual conversation between Joyce Carol Oates and Ben Fountain, moderated by Joe Di Prisco, on Thursday, May 23, 4:00 pm Pacific, program produced by our friends at Orinda Books.

“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

“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

“[Ben’s] 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…. 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

We applaud our 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Finalists: Jamel Brinkley, Patricia Engel, Idra Novey, and Bennett Sims. You can read more about them here.

Read the Full Press Release

READ MORE ABOUT BEN FOUNTAIN

Good News … NewLit’s Ian S. Maloney Has a New Book Out

For our mini-interview with Ian S. Maloney, Director of Jack Hazard Fellowships at New Literary Project, we asked about his work for NewLit and his recently released new book, South Brooklyn Exterminating.

Q: How have you been involved with NewLit?

A: I go back to the beginnings of NewLit in 2015—I first met Joe while I was directing the SFC Literary Prize. I continued to work with Joe and Diane during the Project's early development and then I was asked to direct the Jack Hazard Fellowships. I also had the wonderful opportunity to be on the jury for the 2022 JCO Prize. I love the work NewLit does for writers from so many walks of life. It's an honor to be a part of a thriving, vital literary organization like this.

Q: What Inspired you to write this book?

A: My inspiration for South Brooklyn Exterminating was my father, Jimmy. My novel certainly falls under the category of autofiction, and I based a lot of this book on working with my dad in NYC, during the 1980s and 1990's. This was a tough book to write, in so many ways. I started it years ago, as an experimental novel, where the lead character reconstructs his father's life through the things he leaves behind. I scrapped that and told the story in a more straightforward, honest style, without many of the bells and whistles I had played with previously. I felt this got more to the heart of our working class roots and allowed me to dig into the darkness, then move my characters towards the light of reconciliation and acceptance. Ultimately, it's a story about difficult work, about fathers and sons, and about old school Brooklyn.

About South Brooklyn Exterminating:

South Brooklyn Exterminating is a genuine New York City story of redemption, as a son learns to look past his father’s mistakes and understand his life and work, and a father learns to make amends and mend a relationship in tatters before it is too late. It’s difficult to find literary territory that hasn’t been mined, South Brooklyn Exterminating does just that—taking readers on a journey into a city beneath a city, a trip into the underbelly of working-class New York. The book delivers frightening moments of entrapment and death, brash confrontations with class boundaries and limitations, and heartwarming scenes of compassion, understanding, and acceptance.

About Ian S. Maloney:

Ian S. Maloney grew up in Marine Park, Brooklyn, where he worked as a NYS Pest Control Technician. He is currently Professor of Literature, Writing, and Publishing at St. Francis College and Director of the Jack Hazard Fellowship for NewLit.

Title: South Brooklyn Exterminating | Price: $22

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