Barry Hannah
Photo courtesy of Grove/Atlantic

Born in Clinton, Mississippi, in 1942, Barry Hannah earned a B.A. from Mississippi College and a M.F.A. from the University of Arkansas. His first novel, Geronimo Rex (1972), won the William Faulkner Prize. In 1978 Hannah published Airships, a collection of short stories about the Vietnam War, the Civil War, and the modern South. Widely praised for its raw, lyric voice, the story collection won the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award. Philip Roth called these war stories "masterpieces of their kind." The following year, Hannah was honored with the prestigious Award in Literature from the American Institute of Arts and Letters. While writing movie scripts in Hollywood for director Robert Altman, Hannah wrote his breakthrough novel Ray, a powerful story of a former Navy pilot and doctor struggling to adjust to modern life. Zany as Catch-22 in its point of view, Ray was called "the funniest, weirdest, soul-happiest work of fiction" by the New York Times Book Review. Hannah is Director of the M.F.A. Program and Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, and has won a Guggenheim, the Robert Penn Warren Lifetime Achievement Award, and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In December 2003, he won the prestigious PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story.

I heard the repeating rifles behind me and the shrieks, but my head was a calm, green church. I was prepared to accept the big shadow. But I didn’t seem to be dying. I felt my neck. I thrust my forefinger in the hole.

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