Joan Silber won the $15,000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Improvement (Counterpoint). The judges said: "The art of this exquisite novel rests in Silber's ability to weave the lives of her characters together into a complete whole, providing readers with intimate glimpses into the delicate and often unseen challenges of unassuming, everyday people."
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Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) won the Philip K. Dick Award, which recognizes distinguished original science fiction paperbacks published for the first time in the U.S. The award is sponsored by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the award ceremony is sponsored by the NorthWest Science Fiction Society. Results were announced at Norwescon 41 in Seattle, Wash. A special citation was given to After the Flare by Deji Bryce Olukotun (the Unnamed Press)
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Brad Felver of Toledo, Ohio, is the 2018 winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize: his manuscript The Dogs of Detroit was selected by novelist and poet Lynne Sharon Schwartz from a field of more than 300 entries and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press later this year. He also will receive a cash prize of $15,000.
Drue Heinz, who created and endowed the prize in 1981, died last week.
"The Dogs of Detroit is animated by a tough-minded vision of strife and frustration, beneath which runs a streak of compassion for its bereft, often violent characters," Schwartz said. "With consummate skill and assurance, Felver writes of overlooked people suffering physical and emotional deprivation, who struggle, now and again with success, in thwarted lives."
Felver is also an essayist, and teacher of writing. His fiction has appeared in magazines such as One Story, Colorado Review and Midwestern Gothic. His essays have appeared in New England Review, Hunger Mountain, BULL: Men's Fiction and Fiction Writer's Review, among others. Felver has won a Pushcart Prize Special Mention and the Zone 3 Fiction Prize.