Steamboat Springs Literary Sojourn

Richard Bausch

Richard Bausch is hailed as a master of the short story. Commending his tales for their “incisive wit, perception, and artistry,” The Washington Post says, “He brings to life characters and situations as vivid and compelling as any in contemporary literature.”

Peace, his newest novel, is set in Italy at the end of World War II.  The New York Times Book Review calls it “a short, bleakly brilliant one-act drama depicting the futility and moral complexity of combat…The worst writing about war is either black-and-white or Technicolor. The best, like this, is in shades of gray, evoking the personal equivocations, the doubts, the discomfort and the sheer, crushing boredom and fatigue that constitute the real nature of war.

John Darnton

John Darnton is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and best-selling novelist who has worked for The New York Times for 40 years as a reporter, editor and foreign correspondent.  He was awarded two George Polk Awards for his coverage of Africa and Eastern Europe, and the Pulitzer Prize for his stories that were smuggled out of Poland during the period of martial law.

In his newest suspense thriller, Black and White and Dead All Over, Darnton blends satire and mystery when a venerable New York newspaper becomes a crime scene in this “multifaceted, gloriously entertaining thriller.“ (Kirkus Reviews)

Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh is one of India’s best-known writers. His brilliant new novel, Sea of Poppies, was short listed for the Man Booker Prize in addition to being named:

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2008
A Chicago Tribune Best Book of 2008
A Washington Post Best Book of 2008
An Economist Best Book of 2008
A New York Best Book of 2008
A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of 2008
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2008

Linda Hogan

Linda Hogan, and is widely recognized as one of the most influential and provocative Native American figures in the contemporary American literary landscape. Hogan is a Chickasaw poet, novelist, essayist, playwright and activist – and Barbara Kingsolver hails “her unparalleled gifts for truth and magic.” Among her 16 award-winning published novels and collections of stories, poetry and essays, Hogan was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Mean Spirit, her first novel set in 1920s Oklahoma during the Osage oil boom when exploitation, oppression, and even murder prevailed in an attempt to usurp the oil wealth. People of the Whale is her newest novel about a Vietnam veteran torn between his war experience and his Pacific Northwest Native American community.

Jayne Anne Phillips

After nine years, award-winning author Jayne Anne Phillips returns triumphant to the literary landscape with the much anticipated novel Lark and Termite. It is a story of loss and love set in the 1950s in West Virginia and Korea amidst war, family secrets, dreams and ghosts – and the unseen, almost magical bonds that unite and sustain us. Pulitzer Prize winning author Junot Díaz calls Lark and Termite “extraordinary and…luminous. This is not simply classic Jayne Anne Phillips. This is something far more extraordinary. It is an astounding feat of the imagination. It is the best novel I've read this year.” Alice Munro calls the novel “cut like a diamond, with such sharp authenticity and bursts of light." Machine Dreams, Phillips’ debut novel was one of the New York Times Book Review’s dozen best books of the year.

Erin Mckean - Master of Ceremonies

Delightfully enjoyable last year, Erin returns for another year as our Master of Ceremonies. Erin likes to call herself a Dictionary Evangelist. She is Chief Consulting Editor, American Dictionaries for Oxford University Press, and the editor of VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly.