Gurney Norman, chronicler of Appalachia, member of ‘KY’s Fab Five’ dies at 88

Gurney Norman, an Appalachian writer who documented his native region with humor and love and became a beloved creative writing professor credited with mentoring numerous Kentucky authors, died Oct. 12 at the age of 88. He died peacefully of natural causes, said his wife, Nyoka Hawkins.

Norman was one of Kentucky’s “Fab Five”, a group of writers that included his friends Wendell Berry, Bobbie Ann Mason, and the late James Baker Hall and Ed McClanahan. Like several of them, Norman traveled to California after receiving a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University in 1960.

Norman was born in Grundy, Va., but spent most of this formative years near Hazard in Perry County. He attended the University of Kentucky with degrees in journalism and English. After Stanford, Norman served in the U.S. Army before returning to Eastern Kentucky to work at the Hazard Herald. In 1966 and 1967 he went back out West to be a fire lookout in the Cascade Mountain while working on his fiction writing.

In 1971, he published the novel “Divine Right’s Trip” in the “The Last Whole Earth Catalog. In 1977, his book of short stories “Kinfolks,” was published, later receiving Berea College‘s Weatherford Award.

In 1979, he was hired as an English professor at the University of Kentucky, and later served as the director of the Creative Writing Department from 2000-2014. In November 2023, the University of Kentucky held a two-day celebration in Norman’s honor called Gurneyfest, which featured musical performances, panel discussions, film showings, and readings of his work.

“Gurney’s spirit was so vast, so powerful and affirming, he will never leave us,” Hawkins wrote in a Facebook post Monday. “We have his words, his stories and his books, the gift of his brilliant and graceful writing. But his presence in the world, his essence, his being, was so much larger than books. He was a force of generous, irresistible love that a hundred books could never contain.”

He was the Poet Laureate of Kentucky from 2009-2010. In 2019, Norman was inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame alongside his dear friend, Ed McClanahan, who died in 2021.

“Gurney Norman was not only a great Kentucky writer, he was a cherished teacher, mentor and friend to so many other great Kentucky writers,” said Tom Eblen, who manages the Hall of Fame at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. “His short stories were literally gems that captured Appalachia’s unique characters, language and humor.”

Norman also wrote the novel “Ancient Creek,” and “Allegiance,” an autobiographical series of short stories. In the late 1980s, he also narrated a series for KET exploring the history and culture of different regions of Kentucky.

In her post, Hawkins said that Wendell Berry once said of Norman, “When he writes, the page just falls away.”

Norman is survived by his wife, Nyoka Hawkins, and his sister, Gwynne Griffith of Berea. A celebration of his life will be held later in the year.

This story was originally published October 13, 2025 at 5:18 PM.