Gina Berriault Award reading: Ella Leffland

Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 5:00 pm
Ella Leffland is the winner of the 2014 Gina Berriault Award from the SF State-based literary magazine Fourteen Hills. This highly regarded American novelist and short story writer demonstrates stunning mastery of the techniques of realistic fiction, but uses her facility to illuminate characters whose imaginative lives are rich and often strange. Leffland is perhaps best known for her semi-autobiographical novel Rumors of Peace (1979), about a girl coming of age during World War II. The fascination with personal and social evil that Leffland explores in Rumors of Peace emerges powerfully in her ambitious historical novel based on the life of Hermann Goring, Knight, Death and the Devil (1990). Free.
Location: 
Humanities Building, The Poetry Center
Directions: 

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Website: 
Creative Writing Department
Sponsor: 
Fourteen Hills
Contact: 
Creative Writing Department
E-mail: 
cwriting@sfsu.edu
Phone: 
415-338-1891
Event extras: 

Ella Leffland

Leffland was born and raised in Martinez. Most of her works are set in Northern California. She attended San Jose State University.

Her story Last Courtesies, published in Harper’s Magazine, won the O. Henry Award in 1974. She has written five novels and a collection of short stories, including Mrs. Munck (1970), a gothic tale of a woman’s vengeance on the man who abandoned her decades before, made into a film adapted, directed and starring Diane Ladd.

Gina Berriault Award

Professor Peter Orner, in conjunction with Fourteen Hills, inaugurated the Gina Berriault Award in 2009 ago to pay homage to the former Creative Writing professor. The award honors a writer who has shown, and will continue to show, exceptional storytelling skills, as well as a commitment to helping young writers.

Fourteen Hills is an international literary magazine publishing original poetry, fiction, literary nonfiction and cross-genre work by writers in the U.S. and abroad. Fourteen Hills publishes three titles every year—two volumes of Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review and the annual winner of the Michael Rubin Book Award.

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