'Shooting star' Barry Hannah dies aged 67
Award-winning author of nine novels and four short story collections passed away at home in Oxford, Mississippi
Alison Flood , guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 2 March 2010


'He was not a regional talent. He was much larger than that' ... Barry Hannah at home in Oxford, Mississippi in 1988. Photograph: Robert Jordan/University of Mississippi/AP

Acclaimed US author Barry Hannah, who won the William Faulkner award for his debut novel Geronimo Rex in 1972, died on Monday, age 67.

According to the University of Mississippi, where Hannah taught creative writing for more than 25 years to students including The Secret History author Donna Tartt, the writer passed away at his home in Oxford, Mississippi. He had been diagnosed with cancer 15 years ago, and his death appeared to be due to a heart attack, according to his son, the university said.
Born in Clinton, Mississippi in 1942, Hannah was the recipient of a host of literary prizes for his nine novels and four collections of short stories. Geronimo Rex, set in the American south of the 1950s and 1960s, was nominated for the National Book Award as well as taking the William Faulkner, while his 1978 short story collection Airships, about the Vietnam war, the civil war and the modern south, won the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction award.

Fellow novelist and Mississippi native Richard Ford told the Associated Press that Hannah was "a shooting star". "Barry could somehow make the English sentence generous and unpredictable, yet still make wonderful sense, which for readers is thrilling. You never knew the source of the next word. But he seemed to command the short story form and the novel form and make those forms up newly for himself," Ford said, telling the newswire that the two friends often discussed the nature of "southernness".
Alison Flood's full piece at The Guardian.