Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (Fountain) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1958 or 1959
• Where—Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A. Universtiy of North Carolina; J.D., Duke
   University
• Awards—Pushcart Prize; O'Henry Award; Hemingway/PEN
   Award; Whiting Writers Award
• Currently—lives in Dallas, Texas


Ben Fountain is an American fiction writer, whose 2012 novel, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, was selected as a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award.

He is the author of Brief Encounters With Che Guevara, a collection of short stories. He has won numerous awards, including the Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Award for 2002 and 2004, a Pushcart Prize in 2004, an O. Henry Award in 2005 and 2007, and inclusion of his work in New Stories from the South: The Year's Best 2006. In 2007 he won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a distinguished first book of fiction, and a Whiting Writers Award, a prestigious award for emerging writers, from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation.

Fountain earned a B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1980, and a law degree from the Duke University School of Law in 1984. After a brief stint practicing real estate law at Akin Gump in Dallas, Fountain in 1988 quit the law to become a full time fiction writer. He lives in Dallas, Texas. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)