The University of Hartford’s Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies has named author Eduardo Halfon the 2018 Edward Lewis Wallant Award winner for his novel, Mourning. The presentation ceremony will be April 15 at the Mandell Jewish Community Center in West Hartford, Connecticut. This year’s ceremony will also honor the book’s translators, Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn.

Halfon is a visiting associate professor the University of Iowa's Spanish Creative Writing MFA program. In Mourning, Halfon follows his memory back to his maternal roots in Jewish Poland and to forbidden stories of his father’s Lebanese-Jewish immigrant family. Former Wallant Award winner, Francine Prose, calls Mourning “a feat of literary acrobatics” (New York Review of Books). Mourning has also been described as a subtle and stirring reflection on the formative and destructive power of family mythology, silence, and grief.  

The Wallant Award is one of the oldest and most prestigious Jewish literary awards in the United States. Established by Dr. and Mrs. Irving Waltman of West Hartford in 1963, the Wallant Award honors the memory of the late Edward Lewis Wallant, author of The Pawnbroker and other works of fiction.