Paul Harding (author)
Paul Harding (born 1967 ) is an American musician and author.
Life
He is best known for his first novel, Tinkers of 2009, for which he was awarded the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for the novel. Harding played about 1990 to 1997 in the band Cold Water Flat drums. He has. A Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Masters of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he also taught at Harvard University and at the University of Iowa Literature
Harding grew up north of Boston on the seaside town of Wenham (Massachusetts ) and went with his grandfather, a watchmaker in teaching. As a teenager, he spent a lot of time " hanging around in the forest ," which he attributes to his love of nature. After graduating from UMass, he traveled with his band Cold Water Flat by the United States and Europe. He was always an avid reader, and when he read Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes, he put the book down after the first half to the side and thought " that's what I want to do." In this book, Harding saw the whole world with its history. When he had a break from touring with the band the next time, he enrolled for a summer literature course at Skidmore College in New York. Random was his teacher Marilynne Robinson, and through them he met the Iowa Writers' Workshop, applied and was accepted. Then he studied with Barry Unsworth, Elizabeth McCracken and later with Marilynne Robinson. Eventually he noticed that some of the people he admired most were deeply religious, and so he spent a few years trying to read theological texts and was influenced greatly from Karl Barth and John Calvin. He considers himself as a "modern new - English -taught transcendentalist ".
Musically, he admired jazz drummer. Among them, he keeps the drummer of John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, for the largest.
Harding lives near Boston with his wife and two sons.
Works
- Tinkers. Bellevue Literary Press, New York, NY 2009, ISBN 978-1-934137-12-3.
- Tinkers, Luchterhand literature publishing house, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-630-87367-1.