Robert Olen Butler has published sixteen novels, amongst them A Small Hotel and Perfume River, as well as A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 

In 2013, he became the seventeenth recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. His stories have appeared widely in publications such as The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, The Paris Review, and many more. Butler's works have been translated into twenty-one languages, a few of which include Vietnamese, Serbian, Farsi, Estonian, and Chinese. He is a Krafft Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University. He lives in Florida with his wife, poet Kelly Lee Butler.