Sunil Yapa
| Sunil Yapa | |
|---|---|
| Born | Sunil Yapa |
| Alma mater |
Penn State University (B.A.) Hunter College (M.F.A.) |
| Website | http://www.sunilyapa.com |
Sunil Yapa is a Sri Lankan American fiction writer and novelist. Yapa won the 2010 Hyphen Asian American Short Story Contest for his short story, "Pilgrims (What is Lost and You Cannot Regain)," which is also published in the Fall 2010 issue of Hyphen, Issue No. 21, the "New Legacy Issue." His debut novel, Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (2016) was released on January 12, 2016 by Lee Boudreaux Books, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company.
The biracial son of a Sri Lankan father and a mother from Montana, Yapa grew up in central Pennsylvania and has since traveled and lived in 48 states and 35 countries, including Greece, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, China, and India, as well as, London, Montreal, and New York City.
Yapa graduated from Penn State University in 2002 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economic Geography (where he won the 2002 E.W. Miller Award for excellence in writing in the discipline) and received his MFA (Master of Fine Arts) Creative Writing/Fiction degree in 2010 from Hunter College in New York City, where he studied with two-time Booker Prize winning novelist Peter Carey, Nathan Englander, Claire Messud and 2009 National Book Award winner Colum McCann. During his MFA studies at Hunter College, Yapa received the Alumni Scholarship & Welfare Fund Fellowship in 2008-2010, a grant given only to one MFA fiction student once every three years, and was also selected as a Hertog Fellow twice, working as a research fellow and research assistant to novelist Ben Marcus in Fall 2009 and to Orange Prize for Fiction winning novelist Zadie Smith in Spring 2009. Yapa has also received scholarships from the New York State Summer Writers Institute (Summer 2007), the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (2009), The Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts (May 23 - June 6, 2010) and the University of Houston Presidential Fellowship (2006-2008) ($10,000 awarded annually to approximately 150 out of 30,000 students).
...
Wikipedia