Ben Fountain is an American writer who lives in New Bern, North Carolina. He is best known for Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, a novel about soldiers home from Iraq, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2012. His short story collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara won a PEN/Hemingway Award in 2007, and he also wrote the novel Rasputin Swims the Potomac. Fountain was born in 1958.
