Literary Awards and Fellowships
The Lannan Literary Awards and Fellowships were established in 1989 to honor both established and emerging writers whose work is of exceptional quality. Over the last 18 years, through its Awards and Fellowships program, the Foundation has awarded 161 writers and poets over $11 million. The awards recognize writers who have made significant contributions to English-language literature. The fellowships recognize writers of distinctive literary merit who demonstrate potential for continued outstanding work.
Candidates for the awards and fellowships are recommended to the Foundation by a network of writers, literary scholars, publishers, and editors. Nominators are geographically dispersed and serve anonymously. The final determination of recipients is made by the Foundation’s literary committee.
Through its Literary Awards and Fellowships program, the Foundation hopes to stimulate the creation of literature written originally in the English language and to develop a wider audience for contemporary prose and poetry. Additional Foundation literary activities include Grants to nonprofit organizations including small, nonprofit presses with an emphasis on works in translation, and the Lannan Writing Residency in Marfa, Texas. The Foundation also produces a literary reading series, Readings & Conversations in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Applications and nominations for literary awards or fellowships will not be accepted.
After more than 40 years living in Britain, the American lyric poet Anne Stevenson “has never lost that sense of being on the edge of things, artistically and geographically (and) that is where the clarity and perspective of her art come from” according to England’s Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. Much admired in poetry circles on both sides of the Atlantic and often cited as a role model for women poets, she has published 17 volumes of poetry noted for their musical quality. 
A. L. Kennedy was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1965 and lives in Glasgow. Her books include three collections of stories, six novels, and two works of nonfiction. Since the publication of her first collection of short fiction, Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains (1991), Kennedy has been acclaimed for her innovative voice. Other titles include So I Am Glad (1995), Everything You Need (1999), Indelible Acts: Stories (2004), and Paradise (2005). Her latest novel, Day (2007), is set during and after World War II. She has received many literary prizes including the Somerset Maugham Award, the Encore Award, and the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award. Kennedy has been a long-time columnist for The Guardian newspaper, a judge for the Booker and Orange Prizes, a journalist and reviewer, and a university lecturer. Of fiction she has said, “It is the form that proves most deeply that other human beings are as human as we are.”
Susan Straight’s novels include I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots (1993), Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights (1994), The Gettin Place (1996), and Highwire Moon (2001), which was a finalist for The National Book Award. Her essays have appeared in Harper’s, salon.com, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The New York Times, and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Straight’s latest novel, A Million Nightingales (2007), continues her singularly beautiful exploration of race in America. Her short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s and Zoetrope, among other publications. She has been awarded the California Book Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a Best American Short Story Award. Straight was born in Riverside, California, and lives there with her three daughters. She is professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
Mike Davis was born in Fontana, California, 60 miles east of Los Angeles in 1946, and is a veteran of 1960’s civil rights and anti-war movements. From his first book, Prisoners of the American Dream (1986), about unionism in the United States, to his most recent, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2007), Davis’ fearless writing in 18 books shines a fresh light on economic, social, environmental, and political injustice. Some of his other books include City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Magical Urbanism, Planet of Slums, Dead Cities, In Praise of Barbarians, and No One is Illegal. He is currently working on a book about climate change, water, and power in the U.S. West and northern Mexico. A former meat cutter and long-distance truck driver, Davis has been a fellow at the Getty Institute and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1998. He teaches at the University of California, Irvine.
Paula Gunn Allen, of Laguna, Sioux and Lebanese descent, is a literary critic, poet, and novelist, and a noted scholar of Native American literature. During a long and distinguished academic career, she edited numerous seminal texts including The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in Native American Traditions (1986) and Spider Woman’s Granddaughters (1990) as well as works on poetry and critical essays on Native American literature. She retired from her position as Professor of English/Creative Writing/American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1999.
Daniel Alarcón’s fiction and nonfiction have been published in The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, Harper’s and elsewhere. He is Associate Editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning monthly magazine based in his native Lima, Peru. His story collection, War by Candlelight, was a finalist for the 2006 
Edie Meidav’s first novel, The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon (2001), grew out of her time in Sri Lanka on a Fulbright Scholarship. Her second, Crawl Space (2005), is currently being adapted for film. Her work has received a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, the Kafka Award for Best Novel by an American Woman, an Editor’s Choice citation by The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and elsewhere, and, most recently, the Bard Fiction Prize for Writers Under 40. She lives with her family in upstate New York where she is a visiting writer at Bard College.
Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. In 1980 he immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister, joining his father, who had fled the communist revolution in Ethiopia two years before. A graduate of Georgetown University and of Columbia University’s 
Sineád Morrissey was born in Portadown, Co. Armagh, Northern Ireland, in 1972, grew up in Belfast, and holds a PhD from Trinity College, Dublin. She has published three collections of poetry: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2002), and The State of the Prisons (2005). Her awards include the Patrick Kavanagh Award, an Eric Gregory Award, the Rupert and Eithne Strong Award, and the Michael Hartnett Prize for Poetry. She has twice been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. She is currently Lecturer in Creative Writing at Queen’s University, Belfast.
Jeremy Scahill is an international journalist who has reported from post-invasion Iraq, from the former Yugoslavia where he covered the 1999