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Barry
Hannah was born in
Clinton, Mississippi
in April of 1942. He earned an undergraduate degree from
Mississippi College
in 1964 and a Master of Arts degree from the
University
of Arkansas
in 1966. A year later he graduated with a Master of Fine
Arts in Creative Writing
from Arkansas and began teaching creative writing at
Clemson University
in South Carolina.
In 1970,
while teaching at Clemson, Hannah was awarded the Bellaman Foundation
Award in Fiction. In 1971, he earned the Bread Loaf Fellowship
for Writing. The following year, he published his first novel,
Geronimo Rex ,
which earned him the William Faulkner Prize for writing and a nomination
for the prestigious National Book Award. He followed his first novel up
with
Nightwatchman
which established him as a serious writer.
He left
Clemson in 1973 and accepted a one-year position as Writer-in-Residence
at Middlebury College in Vermont. Hannah went on to teach for five years
at the University of Alabama where he wrote Airships, a collection of
short stories that led him to receive the Award for Literature from the
American Institute of Arts and Letters in 1979. In 1997, he was
nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for
High Lonesome.
For a
brief period, Hannah moved to California to write film scripts for
director Robert Altman, but Hollywood did not suit him so he returned to
the academic as the writer-in-residence at various universities.
Hannah
returned to Mississippi in 1983 for a position of Writer-in-Residence at
the University of Mississippi, in Oxford, where he has remained ever
since.
In an
interview with First Person Book Page, Hannah talks about the
term "southern writer" He states, "No
really good writer could be merely Southern. A fiction writer isn't
provincial, ever. He should be sending back news from the front, news
somebody else might not know about and it should be interesting and
entertaining."
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