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Author and Professor Edie Meidav Wins 2022 Big Other Book Award for "Another Love Discourse"

October 18, 2023 Arts

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Edie Meidav

English provost professor, MFA director, and award-winning author Edie Meidav has won the 2022 Big Other Book Award for Fiction for "Another Love Discourse" (2022 Terra Nova/MIT Press).  The book is also a finalist for Foreword Reviews' Indies Fiction 2022 prize.

Described as "a lyric novel about the play of grief, empathy, new and old love, and the quest to overcome blindness in human relations," the book follows a writer caught in the cross-currents of a fraught divorce and a new love, the death of her mother, and a global pandemic as she plunges into an obsession with the work of 1960s French philosopher Roland Barthes. 

"So many incredible works came out of the pandemic and I feel honored to have this odd book recognized," Meidav says. "Many of us tried to make sense of that strange moment; this hybrid lyric novel is a collaboration with a photographer and the work of the literary theorist Roland Barthes, while also looking at grief, love, hope."

The author of five books, Meidav has had a prolific writing career that has been supported by fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the Whiting Foundation, as well as creative Fulbrights in Sri Lanka and Cyprus. This year she is a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Bellagio Center in Italy, and has had residencies at Yaddo, Macdowell, Fundacion Valparaiso, Vermont Studio Center, Art/OMI, and elsewhere.

Called an "American original" by The Daily Beast, Meidav is the author of “Kingdom of the Young” (Sarabande, 2017); “Lola, California” (Farrar Straus, 2011/12); “Crawl Space” (Farrar Straus, 2006/7); and “The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon” (Houghton, Mifflin, 2000/1).  

Her career has been supported by fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Howard Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the Kafka Prize for Best Novel by an American Woman, the Bard Fiction Prize for a writer under 40, creative Fulbrights for work in Sri Lanka and Cyprus. She has judged for the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Juniper Prize, Yaddo, and as a contributing editor for the International Literary Quarterly, while continuing as a senior editor at Conjunctions. She has led theatrical restorative justice workshops in Sri Lanka, Cyprus, and elsewhere.

From within the UMass Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers, she is the founder of Radius, a project bridging the divide between the academy and our greater community, including young mothers, refugees, people in recovery, or currently incarcerated, by sharing undertold stories and the skills of narrative.

Article posted in Arts for Faculty and Public

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