About
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Garry Craig Powell was educated at Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he read History, Archaeology and Anthropology, and at Durham University, where he did an MA in Applied Linguistics. He has an MFA in Creative Writing (major: fiction) from the University of Arizona.
He taught English, in Spain, Poland, and Portugal, where he started and ran his own language school, and also in the UAE, which became the setting for his linked collection of stories, Stoning the Devil (Skylight Press, 2012). This was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2013, and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize in the same year. From 2004 until 2017 Powell taught Creative Writing at the University of Central Arkansas. His stories appeared in many magazines, such as McSweeney’s, Nimrod, New Orleans Review, and Queen’s Quarterly (Canada), and in anthologies such as Best American Mystery Stories 2009 (ed. Jeffery Deaver). He received fellowships from the Arkansas Arts Council, the Hambidge Center for the Arts and Sciences, the Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow, and the Arvon Foundation in the UK. Since 2017 Garry Craig Powell has been living and writing full-time in northern Portugal, with his wife and step-daughter. |
It's what you say that counts. It's what distinguishes all great art from the other kind.” John Fowles, |
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Garry Craig Powell`s latest project is a novel about two of the towering figures in recent Italian history: Eleonora Duse, the great actress who inspired Stanislavsky, and her lover, Gabriele d'Annunzio, who was a writer, war hero, womaniser and revolutionary. Pictured right: the Marchesa Luisa Casati, one of D'Annunzio`s many aristocratic lovers. Photograph of a statue at the Vittoriale, D`Annunzio`s home, by Garry Craig Powell. Here's an extract from the novel-in-progress, introducing her:
'Gabriele lived across the canal, in the Casetta Rosa. He would receive one of her exquisite invitations, in gold ink on black parchment, crested with a death’s head and a rose, cross the Ponte dell’ Accademia on foot—and find her in the garden with her pet cheetahs on their diamond studded leashes, wearing a sable coat and nothing beneath it, her red hair leaping like flames around her head. In a coat pocket she would have a Lalique flask containing absinthe.' |
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Prizes and Nominations
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Stoning the Devil (Skylight Press, 2012)
Longlist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, 2013 Longlist for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, 2013 Pushcart Prize nomination for "The Jinni Crouching Beside Her", 2011
Katherine Anne Porter Prize semi-finalist for "A Woman's Weapon," 2007
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