Books :: Iowa Short Fiction Award

The 2015 Iowa Short Fiction Award from the University of Iowa Press has been awarded to Edward Hamlin for his debut collection Night in Erg Chebbi and Other Stories.

Judge Karen Russell says of her selection, “The stories in Night in Erg Chebbi are sweeping and intimate and awesomely confident of their own effects. They document staggering, cataclysmic changes—forest fire, flash flood, revolution, murder—as well as the slow violence of grief and degenerative disease. [ . . . ] This is a collection with both depth and breadth, a book dedicated to revealing ‘the universal concealed in the weft of the particular.’ Hamlin spins the globe, jumping nimbly from a treetop lodge on a Brazilian riverbank to the lawn of a governor’s mansion on the eve of an execution to Merzouga, Morocco, ‘gateway to the dune sea of Erg Chebbi.’ [ . . . ] Each story here is a world in miniature, illuminated by the flashbulb bursts of Hamlin’s luminous, controlled prose.”

Available in August, readers can preorder a copy of Night in Erg Chebbi and Other Stories on the University of Iowa Press website.