Record Banner
Vol. 24, No. 16 March 4, 1999

Michael Cunningham (Professor) and Philip Gourevitch (Alumnus) Nominated for National Book Critics Circle Awards

BY ULRIKA BRAND

Columbia University School of the Arts Writing Division graduate Philip Gourevitch (MFA '92) and adjunct assistant professor Michael Cunningham are finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards for the publishing year 1998.

Gourevitch is a finalist in the category of general nonfiction for his book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The book was previously selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review as one of the eleven best books of 1998 and is an account of the genocide that resulted from the 1994 Rwanda Government directive to everyone in the Hutu majority of the country to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority.

Gourevitch, a New Yorker writer, spoke with survivors, witnesses and participants to discover the origins and personal motives for this collective crime. In the Times , Nobel Prize-winning playwright Wole Soyinka praised the book as a "meticulously researched" and a "harrowing account."

Michael Cunningham is a fiction finalist for his novel The Hours, also published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The New York Times Book Review selected it as one of the "Notable Books of 1998," and described it as: "A delicate, subtle, perhaps eerie novel with three parallel stories: one that echoes Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, one involving Woolf herself and one about an American woman who reads Mrs. Dalloway." In his review for the Times, Princeton Professor Michael Wood wrote "Their final intersection is a thing of ...beauty and surprise." Cunningham is teaching a fiction workshop this semester to graduate students in the Writing Division of the School of the Arts.

Gourevitch and Cunningham are among five finalists in each of their respective categories. Winners in all categories will be announced on Monday, March 8th. The National Book Critics Circle is a not-for-profit organization of book editors and critics with some 400 members nationwide. The organization was founded in 1974 to encourage and raise the quality of book criticism in all media and to create a way for critics to communicate with one another about their professional concerns.