BOBBIE ANN MASON

Internationally acclaimed writer known for her evocation of rural Kentucky life

Known best for her short fiction, including the short story “Shiloh,” Bobbie Ann Mason’s work has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and adapted to commercially successful films.

Bobbie Ann Mason was supposed to be an academic. Born and raised in Graves County, a western part of Kentucky, she developed her literacy from an early age by reading popular serials of the time, including Nancy Drew, and The Bobbsey Twins. She would carry this passion for narratives into her adult life. After graduating high school, she moved on to the English department at University of Kentucky. There, she engaged with literature from all over the world as she developed a passion for writing.

After graduation, she moved to New York City,  and contributed articles to various magazines. Feeling unfulfilled by that work, she then pursued a career in academia, getting her M.A. in English from the State University of New York at Binghamton and her Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut. After teaching for a number of years beginning in the late 1970s into the early 1980s, she decided to pursue her creative writing more seriously.

Drawing on her experience with people she encountered from Western Kentucky, Mason’s first short story, “Offerings,” was published in The New Yorker in 1980. Since then, she has never slowed as a writer who details everyday experiences of everyday people mostly in the rural South. The piece of short fiction she’s best remembered for is “Shiloh,” which details the diverging futures of a couple falling out of love. The story succeeds in its reassessment of popular gender expectations, particularly in smaller, more rural communities. The collection of stories would win the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Since then, much of her fiction has been celebrated in different circles and in different capacities. Her novel In Country was adapted in 1989 as a film starring Bruce Willis. Additionally, her memoir Clear Springs was published in 1999 and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. 

She continued to live in Kentucky as a writer in residence at the University of Kentucky until 2011. More recently a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she still calls Kentucky home.