Summary
Peter Mountford’s debut novel, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), won the 2012 Washington State Book Award and was a finalist in the 2012 VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize. His second novel The Dismal Science was a New York Times editor’s choice. In her full page review in the Sunday Times, Martha McPhee wrote, “Mountford’s fierce imagination and intelligence drive The Dismal Science. D’Orsi is a mesmerizing character. His wrecking-ball choices and the truth that there are no easy answers make him utterly human.”
Peter’s short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Best New American Voices 2008, Southern Review, Missouri Review, Conjunctions, and Boston Review, where he won second place in the 2007 contest judged by George Saunders. His personal essays have appeared in the New York Times‘ Modern Love column, Granta, The Atlantic, The Sun, and elsewhere.
Winner of the 2016 Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award for a fiction writer in Washington State, and an Elizabeth George Fellowship, he received the 2010 recipient of Yaddo’s Wallace Residency for a Distinguished Writer, and he was the 2015 Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellow at Bread Loaf.
Peter grew up in Washington, D.C., apart from three years in Sri Lanka during the early stages of the Sri Lankan civil war. In 1999, Peter earned a B.A. in International Relations, and worked as an adjunct fellow for a think tank. For most of that time, he lived in Ecuador and wrote about Ecuador’s economy. He now lives in Seattle, where he serves as the events curator at Hugo House, Seattle’s writing center.
Education
- MFA, University of Washington