EVENT: Reading by writer Edie Meidav, recipient of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize

Edie Meidav, who won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize at the University of Rochester for her first novel, will receive the award and give a public reading at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 17, in the Welles-Brown Room in Rush Rhees Library on the River Campus.

Meidav's book, The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon, is set in the British colony of Ceylon, now independent Sri Lanka, in the 1930s, and follows the story of an American with Utopian ambitions. The reading is free and open to the public and will be followed by a reception and book signing.

Born in Toronto in 1967, Meidav grew up in California and studied writing at Yale University and Mills College. She taught fiction at the New School for Social Research and spent much of her life traveling. A poet and classically trained pianist, Meidav studied and researched the culture and colonial history of Sri Lanka on a Fulbright Fellowship. She was selected by the editors of the Village Voice Literary Supplement as one of their "Writers on the Verge" in 2000.

For more information on Meidav's reading, call (585) 275-8318.

The Kafka Prize is awarded by the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies and the Department of English at the University. It was established in 1976 in memory of Janet Kafka, a young editor killed in an automobile accident that ended a career many believed would have furthered the causes of women and literature.