Judith Guest won the Janet Heidegger Kafka Prize for her first novel

Speaking of Stories

transforming short stories from the page to the stage

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Judith Guest

Judith Guest won the Janet Heidegger Kafka Prize for her first novel, Ordinary People, the story of what happens to a family after the death of their teenage son, which was made into the Academy Award-winning 1980 film directed by Robert Redford, and starring Mary Tyler Moore, Donald Sutherland and Timothy Hutton.. Her other novels are Second Heaven, Killing Time in St. Cloud (with Rebecca Hill), The Tarnished Eye and Errands.

Guest studied at the University of Michigan , receiving her bachelor's degree in Education in 1958. She taught elementary school for a while before trying her hand at writing a novel. She is the niece of poet Edgar Guest who at one time was Poet Laureate of Michigan , and who wrote a poem a day for 40 years for the Detroit Free Press.

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