EXETER, NH (April 15, 2008)—On Tuesday, May 20, 2008, at 7:00 p.m., Nam Le, recipient of the 2007 George Bennett Fellowship, a one-year writing residency sponsored by Phillips Exeter Academy, will read from his work. Sponsored by the Friends of the Academy Library, the reading will take place in the Kaplanoff Periodicals Room, located on the ground floor of the Class of 1945 Library on Front Street. This event is free and open to the public. A reception will immediately follow.

Read Michiko Kakutani's review of The Boat by Nam Le in The New York Times...

Born in Vietnam and raised in Australia, Le practiced as a corporate attorney in Melbourne before coming to America to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. While there, he served as the Truman Capote Fellow in fiction; the following year, he attended the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown under the Grace Paley Endowed Fellowship. Le has been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, and his fiction has appeared in venues including Zoetrope: All-Story, A Public Space, Conjunctions, One Story, and NPR’s Selected Shorts, as well as Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best New American Voices, Best Australian Stories, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He is currently the fiction editor of the Harvard Review.

On May 13, Le’s debut collection of short stories, The Boat, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf.  On May 16, he will hold a public reading at the Water Street Book Store in Exeter. During his year at the Academy, Le has been working on his second book, a novel set in large part on the South China Sea.

Read a profile of Nam Le in The New York Times...

Nam Le's web site provides more information about his background, reviews of The Boat, and dates of additional readings.

For information about the reading, please contact Academy Librarian Jacquelyn H. Thomas at (603) 777-3328.

The Bennett Fellowship, established in 1967, provides time and freedom from material considerations to a person seriously contemplating or pursuing a career as a writer. For more information about the Fellowship, contact Charlie Pratt at (603) 777-3590 or visit the Bennett Fellows web page.

A complete list of upcoming events is available on the Phillips Exeter Academy public events line at (603) 777-4309 and on our website at http://www.exeter.edu/ or http://www.exeter.edu/news_and_events/news_events_2990.aspx. For directions to Phillips Exeter Academy, call (603) 777-4330.

Phillips Exeter Academy is a coeducational, independent preparatory school that was founded in 1781 and originated the system of instruction known as Harkness teaching in 1931. In the spirit of its charter to foster both goodness and knowledge, a Phillips Exeter Academy education will now be free to any admitted student whose family income is $75,000 or less. Committed to educational excellence, the school meets all demonstrated financial aid needs of its admitted students, making the Academy effectively “need blind.” The diverse student body comes from a wide variety of geographic, economic, racial and religious backgrounds approximately from 45 states, the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands and 23 foreign countries.