Tony D’Souza

Tony D’Souza

Fellow: Awarded 2008
Field of Study: Fiction

Competition: US & Canada

Even before he received his M.F.A. from the University of Notre Dame in 2000, Tony D’Souza had been steadily writing and publishing his work.  In 1999, his first published story won the Black Warrior Review‘s award for fiction, and his second one place third in Stand‘s international fiction competition that same year. His first novel, Whiteman (Harcourt, 2006), which grew out of his three years’ experience as a Peace Corps rural AIDS educator in the Ivory Coast (2000-03), won almost every award given for a first novel, including the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Florida Gold Medal for General Fiction, the Best First Fiction award from Poets & Writers Magazine, the GLCA New Writers’ Award, and the Maria Thomas Prize from the Peace Corps Writers Organization; an excerpt received an O Henry Award as well.  With support from an NEA Fellowship in Literature, he wrote his second novel, The Konkans (Harcourt, 2008), a fictional account of his grandfather’s collaboration with the British during the Raj. An NEA US-Japan Friendship Fellowship and his Guggenheim Fellowship are giving him the means to finish his third novel, tentatively titled The Voyage of the Rosa, centered on early Portuguese voyages of exploration during the time of Prince Henry.

Tony D’Souza’s short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Playboy, Salon, Esquire, Outside, Best American Fantasy, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Amazon, and elsewhere, and he has appeared on Dateline, The Today Show, the BBC, NPR, and other venues. During 2008, Mr. D’Souza was a writer-in-residence at the Lannan Foundation and the Jentel Foundation.

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