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Leslie Jamison wins Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize


February 6, 2012—The Empathy Exams: Essays on Pain by Leslie Jamison has been chosen as the newest winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Jamison will receive a $12,000 advance, and Graywolf will publish the collection of essays in Fall 2013.

The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize is designed to honor and encourage the art of literary nonfiction, and is given to an outstanding manuscript by an emerging author who has published no more than two previous books of nonfiction. Last year’s winner, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness by Kevin Young, will be released on March 13, 2012.

“Leslie Jamison is a bright young writer whose writing embodies every element of the qualities we were searching for when selecting a prize winner,” said Graywolf Press publisher and director Fiona McCrae. “These essays have content and style; reading them, you get the feeling that Jamison is a writer on a literary adventure.”

The Empathy Exams explores subjects as diverse as slum tourism, parasites, medical acting, sentimentality, ultra-running, and drug wars through the lens of pain. These essays swirl around the physicality of the body and churn through cultural expectations to find a way to represent pain—and the accompanying impulse of empathy—without distorting them through narrative expression.

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