Bynum Is PEN/Faulkner Finalist

March 9, 2008

Sarah Bynum
Credit: Leigh Dana Jackson

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, associate professor of writing at UC San Diego, who is heading up the newly launched MFA program in the Department of Literature, is a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Bynum was selected for her Ms. Hempel Chronicles (Harcourt).

Joseph O’Neill’s novel Netherland(Pantheon Books) was selected as the winner.  The other three finalists are Susan Choi for A Person of Interest (Viking); Richard Price for Lush Life(Farrar, Straus and Giroux); and Ron Rash for Serena(Ecco).

Founded in 1980, the PEN/Faulkner Award is the largest peer-juried prize for fiction in the United States. As winner, O’Neill receives $15,000.  Each of the finalists receives $5,000. 

The judges considered close to 350 novels and short story collections by American authors published in the US during the 2008 calendar year. Submissions came from over 70 publishing houses, including small and academic presses.

Ms. Hempel Chronicles is a novel-in-stories and is Bynum’s second book. (Her first novel, Madeleine Is Sleeping, was a National Book Award finalist.)  The eight chapters of Ms. Hempel combine to illuminate the story of Beatrice Hempel, a young seventh grade teacher, engaged to be married and new both to teaching and to her school. Scenes of Ms. Hempel’s students are interspersed with flashbacks to Beatrice’s own childhood and family relationships.  Writing for the Christian Science Monitor, Heller McAlpin notes, “Bynum’s Ms. Hempel Chroniclesis not only…about a young seventh-grade teacher navigating the final passage to her own adulthood even as she ushers her students through the tricky narrows of adolescence; it is also a testament to how hard – and important – the work of teaching is.”

In a ceremony that celebrates the winner as “first among equals,” all five authors will be honored during the 29th annual PEN/Faulkner Award ceremony on May 9 at Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. 

More at www.penfaulkner.org