EUGENE–A faculty member in the University of Oregon’s nationally acclaimed Creative Writing Program is one of 10 authors to receive the 1999 Whiting Writers’ Award.

Ehud Havazelet, an associate professor of creative writing who joined the UO program fall term, received the award during an Oct. 28 ceremony at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City.

Havazelet has published two collections of stories–"What Is It Then Between Us?" in 1988 and "Like Never Before" last year, which the Los Angeles Times named "Best Fiction of 1998" and the New York Times called a "Notable Book of 1998."

A resident of Corvallis and graduate of Columbia University and the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, Havazelet is now working on a novel about post-Holocaust survivors in the 1960s. He also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, N.C.

The Whiting awards, which this year amount to $35,000 each, have been given annually by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation since 1985 to emerging writers of exceptional talent and promise. The 1999 recipients include four fiction writers, an essayist, a natural history writer, three poets and a playwright.

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