Authoring excellence

Pam Durban won the 2015 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, for Soon, her latest story collection. The award honors the year’s best book of fiction written by a North Carolinian.

Durban’s stories explore the many ways people lose, find, and hold on to one another. When all else fails her characters—science, religion, family, self—the powerful act of storytelling keeps their broken lives together.

Durban holds the Doris Betts Distinguished Professorship in Creative Writing, the first endowed professorship in the creative writing program in the UNC College of Arts & Sciences. The professorship provides the continuity, stability and commitment that Doris Betts – also a prizewinning author — demonstrated during her 30 years on the Carolina faculty.

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