Bainbridge Writer Wins Prize For First Novel Nine Mile Falls Author Was Finalist For Pen-Faulkner Award For Fiction

David Guterson of Bainbridge Island, Wash., has won the PEN-Faulkner Award for Fiction for his first novel, “Snow Falling on Cedars.”

Ursula Hegi, of Nine Mile Falls, was among five finalists competing for the $15,000 first prize. She was nominated for her novel, “Stones from the River.”

Hegi, 48, is a professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University. She has been on the EWU faculty for 11 years and has won recognition for her writing.

She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1990, and two of her novels have been named “notable books” by the New York Times.

She and the other three finalists will receive $5,000.

The judges considered 300 novels and short-story collections published in the United States in awarding Guterson the first prize, officials said Tuesday.

Inspired by “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Guterson’s novel centers on the trial of a Japanese-American fisherman accused of murdering a German-American fisherman on a fictional Puget Sound island in the wake of World War II.

The other nominees were Joyce Carol Oates for her novel, “What I Lived For”; Frederick Busch for “The Children in the Woods: New and Selected Stories”; and Joanna Scott for “Various Antidotes: Stories.”