Gina Berriault

Gina Berriault (January 1, 1926 – July 15, 1999), was an American novelist and short story writer.

Berriault was born in Long Beach, California to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. Her father was a freelance writer and Berriault took her inspiration from him, using his stand-up typewriter to write her first stories while still in grammar school.

Berriault taught writing at the Iowa Writer's Workshop and San Francisco State University. She also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Fellowship, a Commonwealth Gold Medal for Literature, the Pushcart Prize and several O'Henry prizes.

Berriault had a prolific writing career, which included stories, novels and screenplays. Her writing tended to focus on life in and around San Francisco.

Her novels include:

* "The Descent" (1960)
* "A Conference of Victims" (1962)
* "The Son" (1966)
* "The Lights of Earth" (1984)

Berriault has also published three collections of short stories: "The Mistress and Other Stories" (1965), "The Infinite Passion of Expectation: Twenty-five Stories" ( [1982] ), and "Women in Their Beds: New & Selected Stories" (1996), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. In 1997 Berriault was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre.

Berriault's short story "The Stone Boy" was adapted by the author as a film which was released in 1984. [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0077348/]

Source

[http://www.reaaward.org/html/gina_berriault.html Rea award biographical sketch]