North Carolina author Clyde Edgerton will receive the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s 2015 Thomas Wolfe Prize and deliver the annual lecture on Oct. 6 at 7:30 pm in Carolina’s Genome Sciences Building auditorium.
Edgerton, a Carolina alumnus, has published 10 novels, a book of advice (“Papadaddy’s Book for New Fathers”) and a memoir (“Solo, My Adventures in the Air”). “The Night Train,” his 10th novel, was published by Little, Brown in 2011. Three of his novels have been made into movies — “Raney,” “Walking Across Egypt” and “Killer Diller” — and many more have been adapted for the stage.
Edgerton is the Thomas S. Kenan III Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at UNC-Wilmington. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, honorary doctorates from UNC-Asheville and St. Andrews Presbyterian College, membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the North Carolina Award for Literature.
Raised in the community of Bethesda, near Durham, Edgerton has written about small-town bigotry, religious hypocrisy and greed — three of his most important themes — in a darkly comic style, one comparable to that of Flannery O’Conner, according to Daniel Wallace, J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing.
“Not since Mark Twain has the South been blessed with a comic novelist as important as Clyde Edgerton,” said Wallace. “His voice is unmistakable: at once eloquent and down-home, hilarious and heartfelt, satirical and solemn.”
The annual lecture and prize in the College of Arts and Sciences honor Thomas Wolfe, author of “Look Homeward, Angel,” who graduated from Carolina in 1920.
Edgerton’s talk is free and open to the public. The Genome Sciences Building auditorium is located at 250 Bell Tower Rd.
For more information see: http://englishcomplit.unc.edu/wolfe
