FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — A University of Arkansas writer, hailed by critics as "the Nabokov of the Ozarks" and "one of America’s great contemporary authors," has won a prestigious literary award that comes with the greatest of all praise: the recognition of his peers.

This month, The Fellowship of Southern Writers announced that UA novelist and professor of art history Donald Harington has won the organization’s Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction. Harington joins an elite circle of writers — including Lee Smith, Cormac McCarthy, Madison Smartt Bell, Mary Hood and UA alumnus Barry Hannah — who have won the award since it was established in 1991.

"It’s an honor, of course, to be counted amongst that group of writers," Harington said. "I don’t think I’m quite as 'Southern’ as they are. The Ozarks, after all, is a distinctive region with its own character. But all of the Warren Prize winners are basically postmodern, and I certainly can lay claim to being that."

The author of 12 books, Harington sets most of his novels in the fictional Ozark town of Stay More — a town modeled after the real Drakes Creek, Arkansas, where the author’s grandparents ran a general store and where he spent many of his childhood summers.

Reviewers have sometimes coined Harington’s writing "metafictional" — an attempt to describe his penchant for narrative trickery, fantastical plot twists and the blending of fiction with reality. Harington admits that his novels are "full of Moebius Strips and Chinese Boxes."

For example, in "Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling off the Mountain)" — published by Henry Holt & Company in 2002 — real people intermingle with fictional characters, playing a part in the drama that unfolds. Characters embedded in the story gain preternatural knowledge of the novel’s progress. Time shifts, catapulting the story from past tense to present tense to future. And the ending — well, forget the ending. Harington’s novels may run out of pages, but the stories never end.

"As you ought to know, none of my Author friend’s books ever have endings," one of the characters announces. "He won’t allow them."

It’s a surreal moment, when the author acknowledges himself through his characters and his characters simultaneously acknowledge the fiction around them, but they make a good point, Harington said.

"I’ve often said I hate endings. Like death, endings are final," he explained. As a means of escaping the end, Harington likes to switch the narrative tense of his novels as they progress. The transition from past tense into future accelerates the reader toward the final pages, but what the reader finds at the novel’s close is not resolution; it’s expectancy — the realization that all that has been described is yet to happen.

Such sleight-of-hand is a trademark of Harington’s writing — a brand of magical realism that keeps from tipping into fantasy because he roots it in the plain, true facts of rural life and human nature.

"My work is not metafictional in the sense of escaping the bounds of ordinary storytelling. I have always considered storytelling the most important thing," Harington explained. "I’ve played around with tense shifts and metaphysical devices simply to give the story greater impact and to make the reader an important participant in the story. Perhaps I write stories to wear."

A prolific writer, Harington has already completed his thirteenth book "With," which he describes as: "Robinson Crusoe meets Alice in Wonderland in The Green Mansions." It tells the story of a seven-year-old girl, kidnapped by an ex-state trooper (whom Harington fans might recognize as a villain featured in three of the author’s previous novels). Absconded to a mountaintop farmhouse near Stay More, the girl outwits her kidnapper but finds she can’t escape the location.

Harington is still seeking a publisher for "With," but a chapter of the book titled "Christmas on Madewell Mountain" will appear in the edited volume "Christmas Stories from the South," scheduled for publication this year by Algonquin Press.

Currently, Harington is researching and writing his fourteenth novel, "The Pitcher Shower," which will follow the travails of a Depression-era itinerant, who travels from rural town to rural town, showing movies on a makeshift screen. In April, Harington will interrupt his writing to travel to Chattanooga, Tenn., where the Fellowship of Southern Writers will present him with the Robert Penn Warren Award.

Established in 1989, the Fellowship of Southern Writers evolved out of the Tennessee Arts and Education Council, which was founded through a 1952 Ford Foundation grant to promote humanities education to people of all ages. Members of the Fellowship have included such luminaries as Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, James Dickey and William Styron, among others.

The organization hosts a conference on Southern literature every other year, in conjunction with the Arts and Education Council biennial meeting. The 2003 event represents the twelfth such conference.