The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to announce that Long for This World by Michael Byers has been selected as the winner of the Third Annual VCU First Novelist Award, awarded for a novel published in the calendar year 2003. Byers will receive an honorarium of $1000 and will be invited to Richmond all expenses paid, where he will participate in the First Novelist Forum and, as part of the forum, give a public reading on Friday, September 17. The First Novelist Forum will include the presentation of the award, a reading from Long for This World, and a panel discussion about the conception and successful launching of a first novel. In addition, Byers will receive a pair of commissioned bookends, sculpted by a member of the VCU Fine Arts faculty, and have his work highlighted in the fall 2004 issue of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts.

Long for This World

Michael Byers received his MFA from the University of Michigan and was a Stegner fellow at Stanford University. His story collection, The Coast of Good Intentions, won the Sue Kaufman Prize for first fiction from the Academy of American Arts and Letters. Byers also won a Whiting Foundation Writer’s Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Prize. His stories have been selected for both The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Awards.

We would like to express our most sincere thanks to all who entered and thus made this third contest such a success, and to the judges as well—Harry Kolatz (editor of Richmond Magazine), Isabel Zuber (author of Salt and recipient of the second VCU First Novelist Award), and Colleen Curran (author of Whores on the Hill). Special thanks go to Richmond writer and VCU alumnus David Baldacci (Total Control, Absolute Power), whose generosity makes the award possible.