2010 Pulitzer Prize Winner Paul Harding to Visit WWU Oct. 19

Contact: Connie Mallison, Administrative Assistant to the Dean of Libraries; at (360) 650-4447 or connie.mallison@wwu.edu. 

BELLINGHAM – Western Washington University Libraries, in collaboration with Village Books, will host 2010 Pulitzer Prize Winner Paul Harding at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 19 in Western Libraries, Room 4.

The event is free and open to the public.

Harding received the 2010 Pulitzer for Fiction for his debut work “Tinkers” the first independently published Pulitzer Prize winner since John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” almost 30 years ago.

Harding’s visit will be interactive with faculty, students and the public. Guests are encouraged to bring their own questions. “Tinkers” will also be available for sale at the event through the WWU Associated Students Bookstore.

Harding will also be at Village Books at 7 p.m. to read from his book and sign copies. The event is free and open to the public. Village Books is located in the historic Fairhaven district at 1200 11th St in Bellingham.

“Tinkers” vividly tells the story of an old man at the end of his life as he drifts in and out of consciousness, back to his impoverished childhood in Maine. As time becomes fluid, his memories intertwine with those of his father – an epileptic, itinerant peddler – his grandfather, a Methodist preacher beset by madness. “Tinkers” is a melancholic meditation on love, loss, illness, faith, and the fierce beauty of nature.

The Pulitzer Prize committee called “Tinkers” “a powerful celebration of life [that] offer[s] new ways of perceiving the world and mortality,” and the New York Times review described it as “the most dramatic literary Cinderella story of recent memory.”

Harding graduated from the University of Massachusetts and was the drummer for the band Cold Water Flat before earning his master’s degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has taught writing at Harvard and the University of Iowa. He is currently working on his second novel, to be published in the summer of 2012.

For more information on Harding’s visit to WWU, contact Connie Mallison at (360) 650-4447 or connie.mallison@wwu.edu. For more information on the Village Books reading, contact Nan Macy at (360) 671-2626 or nan@villagebooks.com.