UCI M.F.A. alumna Jen Beagin '11 receives Whiting Award in fiction
Office of the Dean
April 11, 2017
Beagin completed much of her debut novel, Pretend I'm Dead, while at UCI
Jen Beagin ’11, an alumna of the University of California, Irvine M.F.A. Program in Fiction, has received a Whiting Award in fiction for her debut novel, Pretend I’m Dead. Beagin was honored alongside nine other emerging writers at a ceremony held at the New York Historical Society on March 22.
Pretend I’m Dead has been described as “examining the most damaging of human experiences with a lightness of touch—even laugh-out-loud humor.” Beagin wrote much of the novel while at UCI.
“One of the aspects of Jen Beagin's writing that I've always admired is its complete lack of evasion or guile or artifice when it comes to storytelling, to narrative. Much artfulness, but no artifice. It is a really quite fine, and disarming, and the humor is so hard won, because the ballast here in these stories is so utterly painful,” said Michelle Latiolais, co-director of the UCI M.F.A. Program in Fiction and professor of English.
“I like to think of the Programs in Writing at UCI as a small island I was lucky to inhabit for a couple of years, an island for which I'm often very homesick, as it was governed by some of the most generous and gifted teachers I've ever studied with,” said Beagin.
Beagin is the second UCI M.F.A. Programs in Writing alumna to receive a Whiting Award. Danzy Senna ’96 received the award in 2002. M.F.A. Programs in Writing faculty who have received Whiting Awards include Michael Ryan, professor of English and creative writing and director of the M.F.A. Program in Poetry (1987) and James McMichael, professor emeritus of English (1995).
The Whiting Awards, established by the Whiting Foundation in 1985, remain one of the most esteemed and largest monetary gifts ($50,000) to emerging writers, and are based on the criteria of early-career achievement and the promise of superior literary work to come. Former Whiting Award recipients include luminaries such as Tracy K. Smith, Jeffrey Eugenides, August Wilson, Lydia Davis, and David Foster Wallace.