Robert Olen Butler - Awards and Honors

Awards and Honors

Butler is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2001 he won a National Magazine Award for "Fair Warning," a short story that was published in the journal Zoetrope: All-Story, and, four years later, he won another National Magazine Award for "The One in White," a short story published in The Atlantic Monthly.

In 1993, his first story collection, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The New York Times praised the book's "startling, dreamlike" stories about the lives of Vietnamese immigrants living in Louisiana, and said it was "remarkable not for its flaws, but for how beautifully it achieves its daring project of making the Vietnamese real." The Pulitzer committee said that the stories "raise the literature of the Vietnam conflict to an original and highly personal new level."

Butler also is the judge of the annual Robert Olen Butler Prize, a short-fiction award founded and sponsored by Del Sol Press.