Bob Shacochis wins Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction

2014 Taos Summer Writers' Conference keynote speaker, Bob Shacochis, has won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction. Many of you may remember Bob's fantastic keynote reading this summer in which he read from and discussed the themes of The Woman Who Lost Her Soul. While Bob's reading and subsequent roundtable focused on the craft of writing--specifically the way time functions in the novel--it is clear that this behemoth of a novel tackles many pressing political and cultural issues of our time.

In their announcement of the $10,000 award this morning, the judges said that novelist Bob Shacochis “creates an intricate portrait of the catastrophic events that have led to an endless cycle of vengeance and war between cultures.” Find out more here.

In an interesting twist, one of the two runners up for the award is a former TSWC participant, Margaret Wrinkle for her debut novel, Wash. 

Congratulations Bob! A much deserved award for a fantastic, epic novel. 

Introducing the 2014 Keynote: National Book Award Winner Bob Shacochis

We are very pleased to announce that on Sunday, July 13th, at 8:00 PM at the historic Sagebrush Inn Conference Center in Taos, NM, National Book Award winner Bob Shacochis will deliver the keynote reading at the 16th annual Taos Summer Writers' Conference. This event will be free and open to the public.

Bob Shacochis’s first collection of stories, Easy In the Islands, won the National Book Award for First Fiction, and his second collection, The Next New World, was awarded the Prix de Rome from the Academy of Arts and Letters. He is also the author of the novel Swimming in the Volcano, a finalist for the National Book Award, and The Immaculate Invasion, a work of literary reportage that was a finalist for The New Yorker Literary Award for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year. Shacochis is a contributing editor for Outside, and his op-eds on the U.S. military, Haiti, and Florida politics have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. His new book, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, was released in September 2013.