PORTLAND, OR — Atelier26 Books is thrilled to join PEN New England in announcing that Portland writer Margaret’s Malone’s short story collection People Like You has been named one of two finalists for the 2016 PEN/ Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction. This puts Malone in a distinguished list of previous honorees that includes Junot Diaz, Elizabeth Gilbert, Edward P. Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, Marilynne Robinson, and George Saunders. In addition to the national notoriety that comes with PEN/Hemingway honors, Malone will be given a one-month residency at Wyoming’s legendary Ucross Foundation.
People Like You, a collection
of nine stories all featuring female protagonists, was published last November
in trade paperback original by Atelier26 Books, a Portland literary publisher
with a staff of two.
“Margaret’s work in People Like
You is so brilliantly crafted, moving, and witty,” said M. Allen Cunningham, who runs Atelier26 Books from his home office, “that
it’s an incredible pleasure to see it recognized by such an illustrious award. I
can’t help thinking that this is exactly how a high-profile literary
prize should work. I hope other very small presses will take heart
from this. So many are doing such excellent books, and yet many deserving
authors fly under the radar.”
The 2016 PEN/Hemingway Award judges were Joshua Ferris, Alexandra
Marshall, and Jay Parini. Malone will collect her finalist citation at a ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston on Sunday, April
10th. Her fellow finalist is S.M. Hulse for Black River, and the winner of the 2016 award is Ottessa Moshfegh for Eileen. Karim Dimechkie (Lifted by the Great Nothing) and Chigozie Obioma (The Fishermen) receive honorable mention.
Margaret Malone is the recipient
of fellowships from the Oregon Arts
Commission and Literary Arts, two Regional Arts & Culture Council Project
Grants, and residencies at The Sitka Center and Soapstone. Her writing has appeared in The Missouri Review, Oregon Humanities
Magazine, Coal City Review, Swink, Nailed, latimes.com, and elsewhere,
including recently the Forest Avenue Press anthology The Night, and the Rain, and the River. A Dangerous Writers alumnus,
Malone has a degree in Philosophy from Humboldt State University and has taught
creative writing as a visiting artist at Pacific Northwest College of Art. She lives
with her husband, filmmaker Brian Padian, and two children in Portland, where she co-hosts
the artist and literary gathering SHARE.
M. Allen Cunningham, a novelist and editor, founded Atelier26 Books in 2011. People
Like You is the press’s eighth release. Atelier26 specializes in
contemporary literature in elegantly designed trade editions and its titles are
distributed to the trade by Independent Publishers Group/Small Press United.
The late Mary Hemingway, a member of PEN, founded the PEN/Hemingway Award in 1976 both to
honor the memory of her husband, Ernest Hemingway, and to recognize
distinguished first books of fiction. The award is funded by the Hemingway
Family, by the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and by PEN New England.
