Ben Fountain

Ben’s debut novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, was dubbed the “Catch-22 of the Iraq War.” It won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and in 2016 was adapted into a feature film directed by three-time Oscar winner Ang Lee.

Also in 2016, Ben wrote a series of essays published in The Guardian on the U.S. presidential election that were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. He later expanded that work into Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution, a sweeping work of reportage recounting a surreal year of politics and an exploration of the third American existential crisis (the first two being the Civil War and the Great Depression). Publishers Weekly calls it “whip-smart and searching in its indictment of cant and falsity…perhaps the best portrait yet of an astounding election.”

Ben authored the short story collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. Two of the stories won a Pushcart Prize, a third won an O. Henry Prize, and the book itself won a PEN/Hemingway Award as well as the Barnes & Noble Discover Award. Ben’s reportage on post-earthquake Haiti was nationally broadcast on This American Life.

Ben’s 2023 national bestseller Devil Makes Three explored Haiti further through fiction. A riveting political thriller set in the aftermath of the 1991 military coup that overthrew Haiti’s democratically-elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Devil Makes Three follows the lives of ordinary people becoming unexpectedly entangled in a huge historical drama.

From 2004 to 2006, Ben served as fiction editor for The Southwest Review. He has taught at the University of Texas and served a two-year appointment as University Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University. In 2024, he was the recipient of the Joyce Carol Oates Prize from the New Literary Project. His latest novel, Rasputin Swims the Potomac (2026), a biting satire of American politics centering on a world champion professional wrestler with presidential ambitions, has been called “a comic masterpiece” by Kirkus Reviews.