Jump to navigation Skip to content
At the Waterstones bookstore in London, Jenny Zhang talks about several books that have significantly influenced her writing: Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (Random House, 1969), George Saunders’s Pastoralia (Riverhead Books, 2000), and Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (Penguin Books, 1993). Zhang’s first short story collection, Sour Heart (Lenny, 2017), won the 2018 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction.
“I thought, okay, a hundred pages, I’ll do the four seasons, twenty-five pages each section, that’s all I have to do.” Poet and novelist Jennifer Tseng, whose novel, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (Europa Editions, 2015), is longlisted for the 2016 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, reads a selection and talks about her writing inspiration and experience.
"We moved around a lot and I think that's part of what inspired me to become a writer...it's very hard for people like me to answer the question 'Where are you from?' in a very short sentence." Mia Alvar talks about the inspiration behind her story collection, In the Country (Knopf, 2015), for which she received the 2016 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction.
