Tess Gunty — the novelist of the city itself

BORN AND RAISED IN SOUTH BEND · NOTRE DAME, CLASS OF 2015

The tie. Tess Gunty's is the fullest tie this section uses: born and raised in South Bend, a bachelor's degree at the University of Notre Dame — English, with an honors concentration in creative writing — and an MFA at New York University as a Lillian Vernon Fellow. At Notre Dame she won the Ernest Sandeen Award for a poetry collection, so the shelf begins, formally, with poems. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at New York University. Her personal standing — the fame and its basis — stands in Famous People; this entry is the books'.

The Rabbit Hutch. Her debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch, was published by Knopf on 2 August 2022. It is set in Vacca Vale, Indiana, a fictional post-industrial city of a failed auto industry, and in the affordable-housing complex — La Lapinière, the Rabbit Hutch of the title — where its characters are stranded. The novel does not name South Bend; Gunty has said plainly, in interviews on the record, that Vacca Vale is drawn from the city she grew up in, written against the caricature of the Rust Belt she watched politicians traffic in while she was a South Bend schoolgirl, in the years when Newsweek had listed South Bend among its "dying cities." The documented course of the book: it won the National Book Award for Fiction in November 2022, the inaugural Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize; it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize for a first book and for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, which it won in 2023; it reached the New York Times bestseller list and the year-end best-book lists of the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Time, and NPR; and it took an Indiana Authors Award. The full accounting of the honors stands in Awards; the novel's standing as the city's defining modern book is this section's.

The second novel. Honeydew, her second novel, stands announced from Knopf for the fall of 2026 in the publisher's current record — a date that has moved in her published biographies over the years, printed here at its latest documented position, as forthcoming.

Sources:

1. Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau — the South Bend birth and raising, the Notre Dame degree and NYU MFA, the 2022 National Book Award, the Discover Prize, the Indiana Authors Award, the John Leonard Prize finalist placing, and Honeydew "released in Fall 2026" from Knopf.
2. New York University, Creative Writing Program, alumni books — The Rabbit Hutch (Knopf, 2022); Honeydew (Knopf, forthcoming).
3. New York Public Library, event record (17 June 2025) — the New York Times bestseller standing and the best-book-of-the-year lists.
4. Richmond Magazine (7 November 2023) — the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.
5. University of Notre Dame Magazine — Gunty '15, the November 2022 National Book Award, Vacca Vale's resemblance to her hometown noted for South Bend readers; Shakespeare and Company interview program — the Sandeen Award for a poetry collection and the Vacca Vale modeling in her own words.