Ben Fountain Wins 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize from New Literary Project
Oakland, CA, May 8, 2024—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.
The JCO Prize celebrates authors who advance the vision and mission of NewLit. They are emerged and continually emerging writers of major consequence—short stories and/or novels—at the relative midpoint of a burgeoning career.
The JCO Prize is a working prize, and the author will take up brief residence at the University of California, Berkeley (NewLit marquee partner), and in the Bay Area, including Saint Mary’s College of California–teaching and public speaking–in late October, dates to be determined.
Join Ben and Joyce Carol Oates in a live virtual conversation: Meet the Winner, hosted and produced by Orinda Books and NewLit, on Thursday, 23 May, 4:00 pm Pac/7:00 pm East. Registration details here:
Ben Fountain succeeds T. Geronimo Johnson (2017), Anthony Marra (2018), Laila Lalami (2019), Daniel Mason (2020), Danielle Evans (2021), Lauren Groff (2022), and Manuel Muñoz (2023). He was chosen after consideration of a longlist of thirty-two nationally recognized authors, and eventually a shortlist that included four other masterful artists: Jamel Brinkley, Patricia Engel, Idra Novey, and Bennett Sims. In appreciation of their gracious participation, each finalist receives $1,000. The jury that selected the short list consisted of Laura Cogan, Mark Danner, Joseph Di Prisco, Hertha Dawn Sweet Wong, and David Wood. The NewLit Board of Directors judged and selected the Recipient.
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. In 2018, he was a finalist for the JCO 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.
“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
The Joyce Carol Oates Prize is named for the eminent author, an honorary member of New Literary Project’s Board of Directors. NewLit thereby gratefully acknowledges her inspiring, lifelong impact as peerless teacher and writer, an author beloved and admired for generations by legions of students, writers, and readers around the country and the world. She embodies the NewLit’s most deeply held commitments to literature and literacy.
“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, Chair & Founder
“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
New Literary Project, a 501(c)3 not-for-profit, was established in 2015, through an innovative private/public marquee partnership with the University of California, Berkeley, English Department, collaborating with visionary community leaders. Cal has long been the foremost English Department in the world at the leading public university in the nation. In 2023, the highly esteemed Saint Mary’s College of California MFA Program joined as NewLit’s valued partner.
The Project drives social change by unleashing artistic power in order to lift up a literate, democratic society. Sustained by generous individual, corporate, and foundation donors, NewLit fosters new literature, supports authors, and enhances the lives of readers, writers, educators, and students across generations and divides, in California and the nation. Its mantra proceeds from the counsel of Joyce Carol Oates: “Write your heart out.”
As with every year of its existence, NewLit offers creative writing workshops at no cost to high school-age writers from overlooked, undervalued communities, young people with previously insufficient access to arts education.
Bonnie Bonetti-Bell Fellows, creative writers from the UC Berkeley English Department, and Iris Starn Fellows, creative writers from the Saint Mary’s College of California MFA Program, lead nine creative writing workshops in the Bay Area in Spring 2024, at sites such as Contra Costa County Juvenile Hall, Girls Inc. Alameda County, Concord High School, Albany High School, Northgate High School, and elsewhere. Workshops are sustained by the Bell and Starn Families, partnering with the Berkeley English Department and the Saint Mary’s College of California MFA Program.
In addition, the Project curates an internationally distributed annual anthology of NewLit-affiliated artists, including Prize finalists and Joyce Carol Oates and a host of other distinguished authors alongside younger writers from NewLit workshops published for the first time: Simpsonistas: Tales from New Literary Project Vol.5, appeared in October 2023 (Rare Bird). Vol. 6 will be released in Fall 2024.
New Literary Project also recently announced the 2024 Jack Hazard Fellowships, $5,000 summer awards annually given to support exceptional creative writers who are full-time high school educators throughout the United States. Thirty-two Jack Hazard Fellows from around the nation have been selected since 2022.
For more information, please contact:
Diane Del Signore, Executive Director, (510) 919-0970
https://www.newliteraryproject.org/