Paul Harding

This article is about the American musician and author Paul Harding; on the author of historical detective novels under the pseudonym of the same name, see Paul Doherty .

Paul Harding (born December 19, 1967 ) is an American writer and musician .

Life

Harding was best known for his first novel Tinkers from 2009, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Novels in 2010 and for which he received the Robert W. Bingham Prize for work on his second work. Harding played drums in the band Cold Water Flat from around 1990 to 1997 . He holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop . He has also taught literature at Harvard University and the University of Iowa .

Harding grew up in the coastal town of Wenham north of Boston and apprenticed to his grandfather, a watchmaker. As a teenager he spent a lot of time "hanging out in the forest", which he attributes to his love for nature. After graduating from UMass, he toured the United States and Europe with his band Cold Water Flat. He was always an avid reader and when he Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes read, he put the book after the first half to the side and thought "this is it, what do I do?". In this book Harding saw the whole world and its history. The next time he took a break from touring with the band, he enrolled in a summer literature course at Skidmore College in New York. His teacher happened to be Marilynne Robinson, and through her he learned about the Iowa Writers' Workshop, applied and was accepted. He then studied with Barry Unsworth , Elizabeth McCracken and later with Marilynne Robinson. At some point he noticed that some of the people he admired the most were deeply religious and so he spent several years reading theological texts and was greatly influenced by Karl Barth and Johannes Calvin . He regards himself as a "modern New English self-taught transcendentalist ".

Musically he admires jazz drummers. Among them, he considers John Coltrane's drummer , Elvin Jones , to be the greatest.

Harding lives in Georgetown near Boston with his wife and two sons.

Works

• Tinkers. Bellevue Literary Press, New York, NY 2009, ISBN 978-1-934137-12-3 .
  • Tinkers , Luchterhand Literaturverlag, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-630-87367-1 .
• Enon: a novel , Random House, New York 2013, ISBN 978-1-400069439 .
  • Loss . from the English by Silvia Morawetz , Luchterhand Literaturverlag, Munich 2015, 272 S, ISBN 978-3-630-87377-0 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Paul Harding in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Paul Harding in the WorldCat bibliographic database
• Short biography and reviews of works by Paul Harding at perlentaucher.de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://lccn.loc.gov/n2008062825
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Pulitzer Prize bio
3. ↑ Cold Water Flat at Allmusic.com
4. ↑ The Literary Horologist: Paul Harding “Tinkers” With Time ( Memento of the original from June 19, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , OpenLoopPress interview 
5. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j} Paul Harding's Magical 'Tinkers' , audio interview with Christopher Lydon, May 7th, 2009.
6. ^ Paul Harding - "Loss" - About the Force of Desperation , Deutschlandradio Kultur, June 17, 2015, accessed June 17, 2015