The Hemingway Review

Each year the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and PEN/New England award the PEN/Hemingway prize for the year's best first work of fiction. The award is presented at a gala reception at the John F. Kennedy Library, home of the Hemingway Collection, and a distinguished author is chosen to give the keynote address. This year's speaker, Russell Banks, is a prolific and prize-winning writer of fiction. His many novels include Continental Drift and Cloudsplitter, finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and 1998 respectively. He has also contributed poems, stories and essays to Vanity Fair, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, and Harper's. Here Banks discusses how his view of himself as a writer has been shaped by the life and the work of Ernest Hemingway.