Mark McGurl Wins 2011 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism

Posted on April 17, 2011

UCLA English professor Mark McGurl has been awarded the 2011 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. McGurl was awarded the prize for his book, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. McGurl will accept the award next fall at a public event at the University of Iowa.

The $30,000 award is the largest annual cash prize in English-language literary criticism. It is administered for the Capote Estate by the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

McGurl says, "I am truly honored by this award and delighted by the irony that it is made in the name of a wonderful writer, Truman Capote, who contradicts most of the generalizations about postwar American fiction made in my book. I'm proud to think that I have helped move the conversation about creative writing and the university forward a few steps and shed new light on recent literary history, but humbled by this reminder that contemporary literature is a much larger and richer enterprise than any one book or critic could grasp."