Peter Orner

Peter Orner is an American writer, and the author of two novels, Love and Shame and Love (2011), a New York Times Editor's Choice Book, and California Book Award winner and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (2006), a novel set in Namibia where Orner worked in the 1990s, winner of the Bard Fiction Prize and Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His also the author of Esther Stories (2001), winner of the Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction, and finalist for the Pen Hemingway Prize and the Young Lion’s Award from the New York Public Library. Of Esther Stories, the New York Times wrote, “Orner doesn’t just give bring his characters to life, he gives them souls.”

In 2013, Little Brown released two books, a new edition of Esther Stories, with an introduction by Marilynne Robinson along with a new collection of new stories, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge (2013).

Orner's stories and essays have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney's, The Believer, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. His work has been anthologized in Best American Stories, Best American Non-Required Reading, and twice won a Pushcart Prize. Orner was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2006), as well as the two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship (2007-2008). A film version of one of Orner’s stories, "The Raft" with a screenplay by Orner and director Rob Jones is currently in production and stars Edward Asner, star of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Fort Apache, The Bronx, and Up. Orner is also the editor of two non-fiction books, Underground America (2008) and Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives (2010), both published by McSweeney’s/ Voice of Witness.