Rob Magnuson Smith was raised in Worcestershire, England and in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. He was graduated from Pitzer College in Claremont, CA on a Chevron Foundation Merit Scholarship with a double major in philosophy and psychology. His début novel The Gravedigger won the Faulkner Society ‘s 2004 Gold Medal for Best Novel (judged by André Bernard) and is published this Fall by the University of New Orleans Press and is being launched by UNO on opening night of Words & Music. A former Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers ‘ Conference, Rob has had short fiction published in Inkwell Magazine, Karamu, Asphodel, Fiction International, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. In England his fiction appears in Notes from the Underground and is forthcoming in The Reader, New Writing, and Cant Books. Rob is the 2009-2010 David Higham Scholar at the University of East Anglia in the University ‘s MFA program in Creative Writing. He divides his time between England and San Francisco. He is represented by Clare Alexander (Aitken, Alexander Associates) and is currently working on a second novel about love and death in rural Sussex.