Edie Meidav
Encyclopedia
Life
She graduated with a B.A., Yale UniversityYale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
, and M.F.A., Mills College
Mills College
Mills College is an independent liberal arts women's college founded in 1852 that offers bachelor's degrees to women and graduate degrees and certificates to women and men. Located in Oakland, California, Mills was the first women's college west of the Rockies. The institution was initially founded...
.
Her fiction, poetry, and criticism have appeared in Writing on Air (MIT Press), On Globalization (MIT Press), Now Write! Fiction Writing Exercises from Today's Best Teachers and Writers (Penguin, 2006), and other anthologies, and in Village Voice, Conjunctions, The American Voice, Ms., The Kenyon Review, The Chattahoochee Review.
She is the former director of the Writing and Consciousness Program, New College of California
New College of California
New College of California was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1971 by former Gonzaga University President, Father John Leary. After 37 years, it ceased operations in early 2008....
, San Francisco, and taught at New School for Social Research, New York City.
Now she is in residence at Bard College
Bard College
Bard College, founded in 1860 as "St. Stephen's College", is a small four-year liberal arts college located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.-Location:...
, in upstate New York. She has two daughters.
Awards
- Lannan Literary Fellowship (2007)
- Bard Fiction Prize (2005). (2006– )
- Kafka Award for Best Novel by an American Woman
- Los Angeles Times Best Books of 2001
- Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2006
Works
(reprint Harcourt, 2002, ISBN 9780618219162 ) (reprint Macmillan, 2006, ISBN 9780312425753)Reviews
Edie Meidav is a student of human bewilderment. In her first novel—about an American called Henry Gould trying to establish a utopian community in the British colony of Ceylon—she's woven the blundering figure of a holy fool into a bristling tapestry of local life. The Far Field is historical fiction without a shred of nostalgia, and even its sometimes predictable plot is finally justified by Meidav's scarifying emotional honesty and visceral sense of place.
But while Meidav's lens is panoramic, she manages to keep her focus human in scale, providing her readers with a virtual novelistic treatise on the colonial experience, articulated in the accumulated tiny, believable details of her characters' daily lives.