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Speaking of Stories transforming
short stories from the page to the stage
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E. ANNIE PROULX E Annie Proulx was born in Connecticut in 1935, where her mother's ancestors had lived for 350 years. Her father's grandparents had come to New England in the 1860s to work in the woollen mills. Her father was in the textile business and as his career developed, the family frequently moved around. Her mother is a painter and amateur naturalist, and it was through her mother's family that Proulx was brought up amidst a strong tradition of oral storytelling. She has lived in Vermont for more than three decades and studied history at the University of Vermont. In the seventies there were few teaching jobs in history and she moved from academic study to freelance journalism and then for the next 15 years wrote articles covering anything from the weather and canoeing to mountain lions and mice. Whenever she could find the time, she wrote short stories. E Annie Proulx's most famous novel is The Shipping News (1993). In 1988, a collection of her short stories, Heart Songs and Other Stories, was published. Postcards followed in 1991 and for this novel she became the first woman ever to win the coveted Pen/Faulkner Prize. By this time she had already been inspired by a trip to Newfoundland to start work on The Shipping News which was published in 1993. The Shipping News won the 1993 Irish Times International Prize and, in America, both the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 1993 National Book Award.In 1996 came another acclaimed novel, Accordian Crimes and she was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 1997. Her latest book, published in 1999, is Close Range: Wyoming Stories. This is her second collection of short stories and includes the acclaimed novella, Brokeback Moutain. |