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Friday, March 29, 2024

A Pulitzer Prize-winning author is reading at the Alachua County Headquarters library Sunday.

author mug

Robert Olen Butler

Robert Olen Butler, 71, will read excerpts from his latest novel, “Perfume River,” answer questions and sign books at the 401 E. University Ave. location beginning at 2:30 p.m.

The event will be the first in the Alachua County Library District’s third annual Author Series, which brings a wide variety of award-winning authors to Gainesville, said Nickie Kortus, the library’s marketing and public relations manager.

“It’s a great opportunity to meet an author and ask your own questions,” Kortus said.

Butler said before publishing “Perfume River,” a novel that was long-listed for the 2017 Carnegie Medal of Excellence for Literature in September, he liked all of his work equally. But now, his latest work is his favorite, he said.

“‘Perfume River’ is a novel about my boomer generation, about our wars and our families, and how those things interact and intertwine. It’s about the past, and how it’s always with us.”

In 1993, Butler was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his collection of short stories. The stories drew from Butler’s experience in Vietnam serving with the U.S. Army in 1971.

“I just immersed myself, because I was deeply in love with Vietnam — its people, its landscape, its culture, its history,” Butler said.

The author’s appearance in Gainesville — his first in more than a decade — is one of the last stops on his book tour.

“Creating works of literary fiction is a very intense, solitary act, and it’s always a pleasure for me to get out and read to and have contact with my readers, my potential readers,” he said.

mvossler@alligator.org

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