Ben Fountain. He was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1958. He studied Literature and Law, and although he practiced law for a time, he abandoned it at the age of thirty to devote himself fully to writing. At age forty-eight he published his first book, Fleeting Encounters with Che Guevara, for which he won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction. Six years later his first novel appeared, Billy Lynn's Eternal Intermission (Contra, 2016), for which he received the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a National Book Award finalist. His works have been translated into more than twenty languages.