Mary Lee Settle, 2nd Annual ODU Literary Festival

Mary Lee Settle has written eight novels; her most recent, Blood Tie,\u27\u27 received the 1978 National Book Award for Fiction. She has been awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships and the 1975 Merrill Foundation Award. Her play Juana La Loca was produced by the American Place Theater in 1964, and her memoir of World War II, Alf the Brave Promises, will be republished in paperback next year by Ballantine. Ms. Settle lives in Norfolk and is currently working on a novel about the West Virginia mine wars, the fourth volume of her O Beulah Land series

Mary Lee Settle, 8th Annual ODU Literary Festival

Writing for the New York Times Book Review, novelist E.L. Doctorow has said that Mary Lee Settle has a grand passion for what she\u27s doing... high drama... and the instinct of the novelist for panorama... Settle\u27s prodigious writing career includes the publication of six highly acclaimed novels: Blood Tie, for which she was awarded the National Book Award for fiction in 1978, and The Beulah Quintet (Prisons, O Beulah Land, Know Nothing, The Scapegoat and The Killing Ground), hailed by critic Roger Shattuck as an act of faith in the novel... a source of energies we can carry back to life itself. In addition to her fiction, Ms. Settle has published articles in a variety of magazines and journals, including an essay in Esquire this year on Japan. Ms. Settle will open the festival with a reading from her fiction on Monday evening; on Tuesday she will lecture on Researching a Worldwide Novel