Ben Fountain has won the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, sponsored by the New Literary Project and honoring "a mid-career author of fiction in the midst of a burgeoning career, a distinguished writer who has emerged and is still emerging." The award has a $50,000 prize, and Fountain will spend a brief residence at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the Bay Area, where he may give public readings and talks, teach classes, and make appearances.
Fountain is the author of Devil Makes Three (Flatiron, 2023) and Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (Ecco, 2012), which was adapted for film by Oscar winner Ang Lee. His short stories and nonfiction have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, Harper's, the Paris Review, Esquire, the Guardian, Le Monde (France), Reporto Sexto Piso (Mexico), and Intranqui'illites (Haiti), among others.
Oates commented in part, "Ben Fountain writes in the great tradition of such predecessors as Joseph Conrad, Graham Green, Robert Stone and Russell Banks: richly detailed portraits of individuals whose public and private lives conjoin, often with tragic results. His work, like theirs, is fundamentally moral, even visionary; saturated with irony, yet not devoid of sympathy."
Megan Lynch, senior v-p and publisher, Flatiron Books, said that Fountain's "rich, finely-tuned, often quite funny and deeply moral work interrogates America and Americans' place in the world in a manner that has become all the more prescient as his career progresses. His fiction is bold and emotionally charged but wrought with all the care of a master craftsman. Across short stories, trenchant satire, and expansive plots, Ben's work shows his commitment to humanity in all its expansiveness and his deep respect for real knowledge, even in a world that would have us turn away from both of these things. I'm consistently astonished by the profundity of Ben's literary imagination and his devotion to being a fiction writer in conversation with a larger community. I’m beyond excited that he has been recognized with this richly deserved honor."