Summary
Peter Mountford’s debut novel, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), won the 2012 Washington State Book Award in Fiction, and his second novel, The Dismal Science, was a New York Times editor’s choice. His third book, a collection of short stories, Detonator, won a silver medal in the 2026 North American Book Awards.
Peter’s short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Best New American Voices 2008, Guernica, Ploughshares and Boston Review, where he won second place in the 2007 contest judged by George Saunders. His personal essays have appeared in the New York Times‘ Modern Love column, Granta, The Atlantic, The Sun and elsewhere. He regularly contributes feature essays to Writer's Digest Magazine.
Winner of the 2016 Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award for a fiction writer in Washington State and an Elizabeth George Fellowship, he received the 2010 Wallace Residency for a Distinguished Writer at Yaddo, and he was the 2015 Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellow at Bread Loaf.
Peter grew up in Washington, D.C., apart from three years in Sri Lanka during the early stages of the Sri Lankan civil war. The former events curator at Hugo House, Seattle's writing center, he divides his time between Seattle and Nashville.
Education
- MFA, University of Washington