Tess Gunty — the novelist of the city itself

National Book Award, 2022 · born and raised in South Bend

The fame: Tess Gunty's debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch (2022), won the National Book Award for Fiction — the country's highest literary honor — along with the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and the Indiana Authors Award. It is set in Vacca Vale, Indiana, a fictional post-industrial city of a failed auto industry and an affordable-housing complex full of stranded lives, and no reader from South Bend needs the model named: Gunty has said plainly that Vacca Vale is drawn from the city she grew up in, written, in her words, against the caricature of the Rust Belt she watched politicians traffic in while she was a South Bend schoolgirl — Newsweek had listed South Bend among its "dying cities" in her high school years. A second novel, Honeydew, is scheduled for the fall of 2026.

The tie, exactly: Born and raised — the fullest form of the word this section uses. Gunty was born and raised in South Bend, took her bachelor's degree at the University of Notre Dame (English, with an honors concentration in creative writing; she won the Ernest Sandeen Award there for a poetry collection), and took an MFA at New York University as a Lillian Vernon Fellow. She lives in Los Angeles. Of all the figures in this section, hers is the fame most directly about South Bend: the city's condition is her subject, her evidence, and her argument. She is a living person, and this entry states only what the public record states.

Sources:

1. Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau — "Tess Gunty was born and raised in South Bend"; the 2022 National Book Award, the Discover Prize, the Indiana Authors Award; the Notre Dame degree and the NYU MFA.
2. Shakespeare and Company interview program — the Vacca Vale–South Bend modeling, the Sandeen Award, the forthcoming Honeydew (fall 2026).