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May 21, 2009
For Immediate Release
For an Interview:
Jen Wahlquist
(801) 863-8757
John Bennion, an associate professor of English at Brigham Young University, was named winner of the 2009 Marilyn Brown Unpublished Novel Competition for his work, "Avenging Saint." He recently received the award and the $1,000 honorarium that accompanies it at the annual UVU Department of English & Literature awards banquet.
According to the judges’ award citation, the narrative quality in "Avenging Saint," which is set in the hard west desert country of Rush Valley, Utah, with its roots deep among the first generations of European Mormons, has "beautifully captured the song that arises from a land and its people."
When Utah Valley’s well-known author Marilyn Brown created the Unpublished Novel Award in 2000, she had two purposes in mind. First, she envisioned it as a way to encourage writers. Second, the award could recognize and reward the best newly written novels focusing on either cultural experiences in Utah or experiences unique to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from any place in the world.
UVU associate professor Jen Wahlquist of the Department of English & Literature serves as administrator for the competition, which received 14 novel submissions for the 2009 contest.
"All three judges gave John Bennion’s novel the top score, and his manuscript continues to represent the high caliber of previous winners," Wahlquist said.
Bennion has previously written both long and short fiction, several of which works have been published by Signature Books. In addition to writing scholarly papers, Bennion teaches creative writing and the British novel at BYU.
He joins previous Marilyn Brown Unpublished Novel Award winners Jack Harrell ("Vernal Promises"), Jeff Call ("Mormonville"), Janean Justham ("House Dreams"), Arianne Cope ("The Coming of Elijah") and Todd Robert Petersen ("Rift").
When Marilyn Brown created the contest in 2000 and asked the Association for Mormon Letters (AML) to oversee it, her idea was that it would be offered every two years. However, since placing the competition in its permanent home at UVU, patron Brown has agreed to sponsor the contest annually in hopes of increasing interest and the number of entries.
"We would like to see a record number of participating authors by October 1, 2009, the deadline for the 2010 competition," Wahlquist said.
For more details and entry criteria, go to http://www.uvu.edu/english/BrownAward.pdf.
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