Paul HARDING wins the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

PAUL HARDING, the little-known and very much neglected first-time author of Tinkers, published by Bellevue Literary Press, a small, non-profit publisher in New York, in January 2009, has been awarded the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, it was announced on April 12, 2010. And to imagine that it sat in a drawer for three years before it was published! Tinkers is the story of a dying man’s last days and his relationship with his father, and is the first novel from a small imprint to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction since John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces won it for Louisiana State University Press in 1981, almost 30 years ago. Harding is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Tinkers beat two short-story collections for the prize: Lydia Millet’s Love in Infant Monkeys (Soft Skull Press, 2009) and Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W.W. Norton, 2009). Read interviews with Harding at Powell’s Books and Bookslut.