Peter Orner was born in Chicago and is the author of the novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown, 2006), and the story collection, Esther Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). A book of oral histories, edited by Orner, Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, was published in 2008 by McSweeneys for the Voice of Witness Series. The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a San Francisco Chronicle Best-Seller, won the Bard Fiction Prize. The novel has been translated into French, Dutch, Italian, and German. The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo is set in Namibia where Orner lived and worked in the early 1990's.
Esther Stories was awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction, and was a Finalist for the Pen Hemingway Award and the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award.
Orner has published fiction in the Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, The Southern Review, and various other publications. Stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and twice appeared in the Pushcart Prize anothology (Best of the Small Presses). Orner was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2006), as well as a Lannan Foundation fellowship (2007). A film version of one of Orner's stories, "The Raft" with a screenplay by Orner and the film's director, Rob Jones, is currently in production and stars Ed Asner.
Peter Orner is an associate professor at San Francisco State University and is currently the William Kittredge Visiting Writer at the University of Montana. Orner has also taught at Washington University, Bard College, and Charles University in Prague.
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