Lyon College will be awarding the Heasley Prize for Fiction to noted novelist Alice McDermott on Thursday, Oct. 28. She will give a public reading at 7 p.m. in the Bevens Music Room of the Brown Chapel Fine Arts Building.

McDermott has published eight novels, her most recent being The Ninth Hour in September 2017. Her seventh novel, Someone, was a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the Dublin IMPAC Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Patterson Prize for Fiction, and The Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Someone was also long-listed for the National Book Award.

Three of her previous novels, After This, At Weddings and Wakes, and That Night, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Charming Billy won the National Book Award for fiction in 1998 and was a finalist for the Dublin IMPAC Award. That Night was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. 

McDermott has received the Whiting Writers Awards, the Carington Award for Literary Excellence, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for American Literature. In 2013, she was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. She is the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. 

The reading is free and open to the public.