Tim O'Brien

Tim O'Brien is the author of Going After Cacciato, which received the National Book Award in fiction, and The Things They Carried, which received France's Prix du Meilleur Libre Etranger and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In the Lake of the Woods, a work of fiction published in 1994, received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was named best novel of the year by Time magazine.

His other books are If I Die in a Combat Zone, Northern Lights, The Nuclear Age, and Tomcat in Love. His short fiction has appeared in numerous literary and popular magazines, including Esquire, Harper's, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, and in several editions of The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. In 1987, he received the National Magazine Award for his short story, "The Things They Carried," and in 1999 the story was selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Century edited by John Updike.

O'Brien is the recipient of literary awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been elected to both the Society of American Historians and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He currently holds a chair in creative writing at Southwest Texas State University. [extracted from 2000 brochure]

23rd Annual Literary Festival