Nicole Krauss to Receive Wallant Award for Her Novel, "The History of Love"

Release Date: 3/15/2006

Nicole Krauss has been named the 2006 recipient of the prestigious Edward Lewis Wallant Award for her novel, The History of Love (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2005) by the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford.

“Rich, inventive, and continually surprising, this is a novel about lost love, found love, and rediscovered love; it is about where we find love when it seems all too elusive and what happens when we do. In short, it is a triumph,” notes the Barnes & Noble Review from its “Discover Great New Writers” series. The acclaimed second novel from Krauss has been selected by Book of the Month Club, and Warner Brothers has optioned the film rights.

The History of Love spans of period of more than 60 years and takes readers from Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe to present day Brighton Beach. The novel’s main protagonists are 80-year-old Leopold Gursky, a retired locksmith living in New York City who has long outlived his family and friends, and a 14-year-old girl named Alma Singer, who when not watching over her little brother, who thinks he might be the Messiah, is trying to find a new husband for her mother after her father’s death from pancreatic cancer seven years earlier.

“The poetry of her prose, along with an uncanny ability to embody two completely original characters, is what makes Krauss an expert at her craft,” notes the Amazon.com review.

The Wallant Award is one of the oldest and most prestigious Jewish literary awards in the United States. Established 43 years ago by Dr. and Mrs. Irving Waltman of West Hartford, the Wallant Award is presented to an American Jewish writer, preferably unrecognized, whose published work of fiction is deemed to have significance for the American Jew. The award honors the memory of Edward Lewis Wallant, author of The Pawnbroker and other works of fiction, who died prematurely in 1962.

Krauss joins a distinguished list of award recipients, including Cynthia Ozick, Curt Leviant, Chaim Potok, Myla Goldberg, and Dara Horn. Krauss’ first novel was Man Walks into a Room. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, and “Best American Short Stories.”

Krauss will be formally presented with the Wallant Award at a ceremony on Wednesday, March 15, at 7:30 p.m. in the University of Hartford’s Wilde Auditorium in the Harry Jack Gray Center, 200 Bloomfield Ave., West Hartford. The ceremony, which is free and open to the public, will feature remarks by Krauss and a discussion by Krauss and the Wallant Award judges — Victoria Aarons, professor of English and department chair at Trinity University in San Antonio; S. Lillian Kremer, University Distinguished Professor Emerita in the English department at Kansas State University; and Mark Shechner, professor of English and department chair at Buffalo State University.


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