Richard Ford

Ford grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, severely dyslexic in an era before the condition was widely recognized or accommodated, and drifted through law school and a stint as a sportswriter before committing fully to fiction in his thirties, after two commercially unsuccessful early novels nearly ended his career.

The Sportswriter introduced Frank Bascombe, the wry, grief-carrying narrator Ford returned to across four novels; Independence Day, the second, made him the first writer to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for the same book.

Long associated with the 'dirty realism' generation alongside Raymond Carver, he has taught and lived across the American South and beyond, publishing steadily into his eighties.