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Last summer, we brought you news of NoViolet Bulawayo, an SMU alumna who was named 12th Caine Prize winner. Bulawayo received a master’s in literature here in Dallas before heading to Cornell for an MFA, where she honed her already remarkable talent and launched a career as one of the nation’s most lauded literary writers. Yesterday, she had more big news.
Bulawayo has been named one of the five fiction writers chosen as Stanford University’s 2012 Stegner Fellows, an honor held by some of the most significant names in recent literary history such as Raymond Carver, Ken Kesey, Tobias Wolff, and North Texas’ own Larry McMurtry. Named for fiction writer and historian, Wallace Stegner, the fellowship is among the highest echelons of American literary achievement, with an astronomical 0.5 percent acceptance rate. As such, the honor — and the time spent in Palo Alto — provides a founding basis for some of the most respected careers of our time.
We don’t have to tell you how extraordinary her talent is; in fact, our paltry words wouldn’t do her justice, as her work attains a life of its own. Read “Hitting Budapest,” the immaculate short story that firmly solidified her fate as a superstar, and follow this Zimbabwe-born writer’s rapidly blooming career at novioletbulawayo.com.
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