News
Miami graduate wins PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers
4/2006
Christopher Coake, who received his M.A. in Fiction from Miami, returned in spring 2005 as the creative writing judge and is now an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, was named the 2006 winner of the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers ($35,000)
The PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers honors an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work a novel or collection of short stories published in 2005 represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise. The winner receives a cash award of $35,000, a stipend intended to permit a significant degree of leisure in which to pursue a second work of literary fiction. The Robert Bingham Fellow is also encouraged to become an active participant in the PEN community and its programs advancing literature, free expression, and the worldwide PEN community of writers.
This year’s PEN/Robert Bingham Fellow is Christopher Coake for his collection of stories entitled We’re in Trouble (Harcourt).
The judges write in their citation:
“In all of these stories, and in practically every sentence that composes them, there is a germ of bland familiarity that, in Coake’s hands, has been twisted into the strange, the new, and the alarming. The gesture of this twist is the book's connecting theme. We're in Trouble takes its cues from the anxious world of cable news, the endless amber alerts and horrific car crashes, the adventure stories gone awry. Beneath the dramatic surface of these stories are all sorts of questions and reflections about our own voyeurism, about our own need for stories.”
-2006 Judges: Thomas Beller, Heidi Julavits, and Victoria Redel
The PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowships have been established in memory of Robert Bingham, who died in 1999 at the age of 33, to commemorate his love of literature and his contribution to literary fiction. Bingham was the author of two well-received books (a novel and short story collection, both published by Doubleday) and served as the editor of the avant-garde magazine Open City. Carolyn Cooke, Jonathan Safran Foer, Will Heinrich, Matthew Klam, Manil Suri, and Monique Truong have all been Bingham fellows.
The 2006 PEN Literary Awards were presented in New York on the evening of Monday, May 22, at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center.
For more information contact Nick Burd: (212) 334-1660, ext. 108, nick@pen.org
Chistopher Coake is one of several former M.A. students who has posted a comment about the program on the Creative Writing program website.