Annie Proulx, former Ucross Fellow and Trustee, served as a PEN/Hemingway panelist and reflected afterward that there were so many promising writers but only one award to give. "Would Ucross be interested in enhancing the award by supporting several other writers with residencies?" she asked. Our answer was a resounding yes, and we began our PEN/Hemingway partnership in 1995 with invitations to the award winner, two finalists, and two honorable mentions. We have since hosted 33 PEN/Hemingway Fellows at Ucross, including Elizabeth Gilbert, author of four books including the National Book Award finalist, The Last American Man, and the international bestseller Eat Pray Love; Manil Suri, author of The Death of Vishnu and The Age of Shiva; and Samantha Chang, who currently heads the prestigious Writer's Worskhop at the University of Iowa. (For complete list, click here.) To visit thieir website click here.
[Patrick Hemingway (left) congratulates Joshua Ferris, winner of the 2008 Ernest Hemingway Foundation / PEN Award for First Fiction for his novel Then They Came to the End. The ceremony took place in April at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Ferris was a writer-in-residence at Ucross in October. Photo credit: Tom Fitzsimmons, JFK Library Foundation]