Paul Harding

Harding grew up in Wenham, Massachusetts, and worked for years as a drummer in a touring rock band before studying at the Iowa Writers' Workshop under Marilynne Robinson, whose own patient, meditative prose left a clear mark on his.

Tinkers (2009), his debut novel, follows a dying clock-repairer named George Crosby as his final days of consciousness dissolve into memories of his own epileptic, itinerant father, its dense, incantatory prose compressing an entire rural New England lineage into one deathbed's last hours; rejected by every major publisher, it was picked up by a tiny nonprofit press and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 2010, one of the least commercially expected wins in the prize's history.

He has since published two further novels, Enon and This Other Eden, and teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, continuing to write dense, lyrical fiction of rural New England family inheritance.