Gary Fisketjon, Vice President and Editor-at-Large at Alfred A. Knopf, has been awarded the 2006 Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction. No link but release details below:
The Mercantile Library Center for Fiction is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2006 Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction is Gary Fisketjon, Vice President and Editor-at-Large at Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Maxwell E. Perkins, of Scribner’s, was one of the most important editors in American literary history. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Ernest Hemingway are the best known of the many writers he nurtured and supported over his long career, and he is considered by many to be the most admired book editor in the world. This award, named in his honor, recognizes an editor, publisher, or agent who over the course of his or her career has discovered, nurtured, and championed writers of fiction in the United States.
Fisketjon has been chosen because of his impressive work as an editor at Random House and Vintage Books from 1980 to 1986, where he created the Vintage Contemporaries Series, as Editorial Director of the Atlantic Monthly Press from 1986 to 1990, and since then as Editor-at-Large and Vice President of Alfred A. Knopf. Among the writers he has worked with are Julian Barnes, Blanche McCrary Boyd, Peter Carey, Raymond Carver, Martin Clark, Jonathan Coe, Nik Cohn, Annie Dillard, Andre Dubus, Bret Easton Ellis, Richard Ford, Tim Gautreaux, Martha Gellhorn, Kent Haruf, Patricia Highsmith, Michel Houellebecq, William Kittredge, Beverly Lowry, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas McGuane, Allan Gurganus, Jay McInerney, Haruki Murakami, Alix Ohlin, Jonathan Raban, Richard Russo, Jim Shepard, Mona Simpson, Mark Spragg, Graham Swift, Donna Tartt, Rupert Thomson, Gore Vidal, Joy Williams, Jeanette Winterson, Geoffrey Wolff, Tobias Wolff, Stephen Wright, and Steve Yarbrough. Their honors include the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award.
In announcing the 2006 winner Noreen Tomassi, Executive Director of the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction, said,“The creation of the Vintage Contemporaries series was a landmark event in fiction publishing in America, and Gary also has an incredible track record working with some of the finest American writers. The Maxwell Perkins Award was presented for the first time last year to Nan A. Talese, and we can’t imagine a more appropriate recipient for the second award than Gary Fisketjon.”
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