Paul Harding

Paul Harding is an American novelist and musician born in 1967, who grew up on the North Shore of the Boston area in Wenham, Massachusetts. He holds a BA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Harding apprenticed under his grandfather who repaired clocks, an experience that found its way into his debut novel. He currently teaches creative writing at Emerson College. His debut novel Tinkers (2009), published by the small Bellevue Literary Press after years of rejections, won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—one of the most improbable wins in the prize's history, as it had sold fewer than seven thousand copies at the time of the announcement. The novel, a lyrical meditation on life and mortality in New England, established his distinctive voice. His subsequent novels include Enon (2013) and This Other Eden (2023), the latter longlisted for the Booker Prize.