The 2008 Kafka Award Winner
This year the 2008 Recipient of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman is Saher Alam for her novel "The Groom to Have Been"
Come meet the author!
Book reading & award ceremony, followed
by an hors d’oeuvres reception & book signing.
Books will be available
for purchase at the event provided by Campus Bookstore.
This event is free and open to the public.
Thursday, October 29th
5-7pm
Welles-Brown Room
Rush Rhees Library
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About the book
"To please his mother, Nasr has agreed to an arranged marriage in this insightful and ambitious debut novel with echoes of The Age of Innocence. In rich detail, The Groom to Have Been recounts the story of Nasr, his friends and family in New York and Montreal both before and after 9/11 and his impending wedding to a fellow Indian-Canadian Muslim.”
-Kathleen McGowan, 2008
Janet Heidinger Kafka Award Committee Chair
About the Author
Saher Alam was born in Lucknow, India, in 1973 and moved to the United States in 1978. She is a graduate of Princeton University and the Creative Writing Program at Boston University. She was a fiction fellow at Emory University, and her stories have appeared in Best of the Fiction Workshops and the journal Literary Imagination. She lives in Missouri.
About the Award
THE JANET HEIDINGER KAFKA PRIZE FOR FICTION BY AN AMERICAN WOMAN
Since 1976, the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies and the Department of English at the University of Rochester have awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman. The idea for the prize came out of the personal grief of the friends and family of a fine young editor who was killed in an automobile accident just as her career was beginning to achieve its promise of excellence. She was 30 years old, and those who knew her believed she would do much to further the causes of literature and women. Her family, her friends, and her professional associates in the publishing industry created the endowment from which the prize is bestowed, in memory of Janet Heidinger Kafka and the literary standards and personal ideals for which she stood.
Each year a substantial cash prize is awarded annually to a woman who is a USA citizen, and who has written the best book-length work of prose fiction, whether novel, short stories, or experimental writing. We are particularly interested in calling attention to the work of a promising but less established writer.
About the Committee:
This year's Committee members were:
Kathy McGowan, Rush Rhees Library,
Stephanie Li, English and
Juliet Sullivan,
Center for Academic Support