Novelist and short story writer Richard Bausch, who will participate in the 2011 Arts & Education Council’s Conference on Southern Literature, has been nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Fiction for a collection of short stories, Something is Out There: Stories (Knopf).
Last year Mr. Bausch won the prestigious Dayton Peace Prize for his novel Peace. The 31st annual LA Times prizes will be awarded at a ceremony at the newspaper on April 29.
"In this fine new collection, Mr. Bausch presents us with young people and old people; married, single and divorced people; straight and gay people; professional and blue-collar people; and people who are simply layabouts," The New York Times said of Something is Out There.
"They make bad choices, occasionally even deadly choices, because they can’t help themselves — and because the universe is full of peril and temptation. But some of them pause to realize that beauty and honor are also within reach. They all circle around a disturbing truth: that the power we have to shape our own lives can be as terrifying as it is liberating."
A past Chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, which is affiliated with the AEC Conference, Mr. Bausch will take part in a panel discussion on "The Ultimate Conflict - Writing about War" during the literary festival, set for April 14 to 16.
Holder of the Moss Chair of Excellence in English at the University of Memphis, Mr. Bausch was honored at a ceremony last November 8 in Dayton, Ohio, where he accepted the $10,000 first prize in the fiction category for Peace.
The Dayton Literary Peace Prize is the only international literary peace prize awarded in the United States. It stems from the desire of its founders to commemorate the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that ended the war in Bosnia. The award honors the power of literature to foster peace, social justice, and global
understanding.
Peace, set among American solders in Italy during World War II, deals with the corrosiveness of violence, the human cost of war, and the redemptive power of mercy.
A Georgia native, Mr. Bausch is the author of 11 novels, including Rebel Powers, In The Night Season, Hello To the Cannibals and Thanksgiving Night.
His stories have been collected in Spirits, Someone To Watch Over Me, The Stories of Richard Bausch, Wives & Lovers: 3 Short Novels. Something is Out There is his most recent publication.
Mr. Bausch has won two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Writer's Award and the 2004 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.
For more information about the Conference on Southern Literature or to register call 267-1218.