Robert Butler

Robert Olen Butler is an acclaimed American author, recognized for his significant contributions to the literary world. He has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1993 for his collection of short stories, "A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain." Butler's work is highly regarded, and he has also been awarded the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Butler has a prolific writing career, having published sixteen novels and six volumes of short fiction. His works have been translated into twenty-one languages and have been featured in various publications such as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, Granta, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Sewanee Review. His stories have been selected for inclusion in several major annual anthologies and college literature textbooks, and he has received two National Magazine Awards in Fiction and two Pushcart Prizes. He has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and has received both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

In addition to his writing, Butler has been a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University. He has also worked as a literary envoy for the U.S. State Department, lecturing in universities and appearing at conferences in 17 countries. In 2001, he made history by revealing his writing process in full, in real-time, in a webcast that observed him write a literary short story from its first inspiration to its final polished form. This groundbreaking series, "Inside Creative Writing," has been popular on YouTube.

Butler has also worked as a screenwriter, hired to write feature-length screenplays for major studios such as New Regency, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney, Universal Pictures, Baldwin Entertainment Group, and HBO. He has recorded the audio books for four of his works, including "A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain," "Hell," "A Small Hotel," and "Perfume River." Butler's achievements in the literary world are highly respected, and he continues to inspire aspiring writers with his work and lectures.