UC Irvine News Brief: UCI awards first Henfield Prize for fiction writing to grad student
James Zwerneman, who is currently working on a novel and a collection of stories, receives $10,000.
Third-year M.F.A. student James Zwerneman is the recipient of the first UCI Henfield Prize, established with a $300,000 endowment from the Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation. The $10,000 annual award is among the most prestigious available to promising young authors. Well-known honorees have included Walter Mosley, Mona Simpson and Ann Patchett. Zwerneman, who is currently working on a novel and a collection of stories, is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and has lived in Israel, Spain and Grenada. UCI is one of five universities whose creative writing programs have been chosen to award a Henfield Prize from 2011 forward for the best work of fiction written by one of their graduate students. The others are the University of Virginia, the University of Iowa, Columbia University and the University of Michigan.