The bestselling novelist Ann Patchett, of Nashville, has been named the 2002 PEN/Faulkner winner for her 2001 book, Bel Canto. With an honorarium of $15,000, the prize is America’s largest juried award for fiction, selected by writer-peers from more than 250 novels and short story collections. Based loosely on the 1996 terrorist takeover in Peru, Bel Canto was already receiving strong reviews when Patchett’s book tour brought her to Oxford’s Square Books last summer; but the national attacks in September 2001 brought even more attention to the lyrical story of an opera singer who captivates her captors and fellow hostages alike.
Patchett was interviewed on National Public Radio this April along with Rene Fleming, the soprano whose voice inspired the author’s creation of her heroine, Roxane Coss. NPR dramatically spliced brief recordings of Fleming’s performances into the program. On Mother’s Day, CBS interviewed Patchett and her mother, Jeanne Ray, who wrote her popular first novel, Julie and Romeo, at 60. “Thrilled” was Patchett’s response to news of the PEN/Faulkner Award, which she accepted in May at Washington, D.C.’s Folger Shakespeare Library. The PEN/Faulkner Foundation, which also sponsors the Writers in Schools Project, is named after the Nobel Prize winner from Oxford, who shared his Nobel grant by creating an award for young writers. 
Joan Wylie Hall