Francisco Goldman

Francisco Goldman has published four novels and one book of non-fiction. His most recent novel is Say Her Name, published in April 2011. His first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens (1992), won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. His subsequent novels have been finalists for several prizes, including The Pen/Faulkner and the International Dublin Literary Award. The Art of Political Murder won The Index on Censorship T.R. Fyvel Book Award, The WOLA/Duke Human Rights Book Award, and has been shortlisted for the 2012 Ryszard Kapuscinski International Award for Literary Reportage. Say Her Name, in its French translation, won the 2011 Prix Femina Etranger.

Goldman wrote about his wife's death and their relationship in the autobiographical novel Say Her Name. He adapted a portion of it as "The Wave," published in the February 7, 2011 edition of The New Yorker.

Francisco Goldman was awarded the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellowship for Fiction, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2010 Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

It was selected as a New York Times Notable Book, and a Best Book of the Year at Washington Post Book World, The Economist, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Daily News. The book has been widely acclaimed. The book is the winner of the 2008 TR Fyvel Freedom of Expression Book Award from the Index on Censorship and of the 2008 Duke University-WOLA (Washington Office on Latin America) Human Rights Book Prize. It was shortlisted for the 2008 Golden Dagger Award in non-fiction and for the inaugural Warwick Prize for Writing. The paperback edition was published with an Afterword meant to rebut critics in a "disinformation campaign" against the conclusions of the book.

In November 2007, Goldman acted as guest-fiction editor for Guernica Magazine. The Ordinary Seaman was named one of the 100 Best American Books of the Century by The Hungry Mind Review. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998 and has been a fellow at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. His books have been translated and published in a total of 15 languages worldwide.

In the 1980s, Goldman covered the wars in Central America as a contributing editor to Harper's magazine. Goldman's 2007 book, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?, is a nonfiction account of the assassination of Guatemalan Catholic Bishop Juan José Gerardi Conedera by the Guatemalan military. The book, an expansion on his article in The New Yorker, represents the culmination of years of journalistic investigation.

Goldman was married to Rebecca (Bex) Brian, the novelist, in the early 1980s. They divorced in 1985. In 2005, Goldman married Aura Estrada, who died in a bodysurfing accident in Mexico in 2007. He established The Aura Estrada Prize in her honor, to be given every two years to a female writer, 35 or under, who writes in Spanish and lives in the United States or Mexico.

Francisco Goldman (born 1954) is an American novelist, journalist, and Allen K. Smith Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, Trinity College.