Peter Orner’s Still No Word from You: Notes in the Margin Longlisted for PEN Award.

January 23, 2023

Peter Orner’s recent Still No Word from You: Notes in the Margin is something great, and something you want to keep coming back to again and again. Just yesterday, Peter was named among the long-list recipients of the  2023 PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY for this inspiring and unconventional memoir.

The PEN award specifically recognizes “seasoned writers whose collection of essays is an expansion on their corpus of work and preserves the distinguished art form of the essay.” Still No Word from You does all that and something more: It’s unique chain of essays and intimate stories link Peter’s lived and reading lives together in memory.

Check out these recent reviews of Still No Word from You in The Los Angeles TimesThe New York TimesKirkusand Literary Hub – where Peter discusses endings, memory, and writing against classification in an interview with Emma Cline.

You can also follow him directly on his Twitter, Facebook and Instagram feeds, and look for him on tour. For example: next week you can catch him live in San Francisco for a conversation with Daniel Gumbiner, editor of The Believer, and also at Book Passage in Corte Madera, CA with fellow novelist Tom Barbash.

Peter Orner

Peter Orner is the author of the novels The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love and the story collections Esther StoriesLast Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, and Maggie Brown & Others. His previous collection of essays, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Peter’s inspiring and unconventional memoir, Still No Word from You: Notes in the Margin won the 2023 Pen/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. A three-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, Orner's work has appeared in Best American Short StoriesThe New York TimesThe New YorkerThe Atlantic MonthlyThe Paris ReviewGrantaMcSweeney'sThe Believer and many other publications. He has been awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, as well as a Fulbright to Namibia. He's the Director of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and lives with his family in Norwich, Vermont where he’s also a volunteer firefighter with the Norwich Fire Department. 

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