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.
August Kleinzahler published his first book of poetry, A Calendar of Airs, in 1978. Since then, he has published seven others, including Storm over Hackensack (1985); Earthquake Weather (1989); Red Sauce Whiskey and Snow (
Charles D’Ambrosio is from the Pacific Northwest. He has an 
Katie Ford is the author of Deposition (Graywolf Press) and Colosseum (Graywolf Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and Poets & Writers. She has taught at Loyola University, Reed College, and now at Franklin and Marshall College. She lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, in the former Soviet Union, in 1977, and immigrated in 1993 to the United States where his family was granted political asylum. He is the author of Dancing in Odessa (2004), which won the Whiting Writer’s Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry magazine. In 2008 he received a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Kaminsky teaches in the 
Glenn Patterson was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1961, and holds an MA in Creative Writing from East Anglia University, England. He is the author of seven novels including Burning Your Own (1988), for which he was awarded the Rooney Prize and a Betty Trask first novel prize, The International (1999), Number 5 (2003), That Which Was (2004), and The Third Party (2007). A collection of his journalism was published as Lapsed Protestant in 2006. In 2005 he was elected to Aosdána, which recognizes artists whose work has made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland. A memoir, Once Upon a Hill: Love in Troubled Times, has just been published in the UK and Canada.
Philip Kitcher is the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. An eminent philosopher, he is the author of many books on philosophy, science, literature, and music, including Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism; The Lives to Come: The Genetic Revolution and Human Possibilities; Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Knowledge; Science, Truth, and Democracy; In Mendel’s Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology; and Finding an Ending: Reflections on Wagner’s Ring. His most recent book is Joyce’s Kaleidoscope: An Invitation to Finnegan’s Wake.
John Gray is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern and False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. A regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, he is an emeritus professor at the London School of Economics.
Sheldon S. Wolin is Professor of Politics (emeritus), Princeton University. He has previously taught at Oberlin College and the University of California at Berkeley and served as Eastman Professor at Oxford University. He was founding editor of the journal Democracy. His other publications include The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution and Tocqueville: Between Two Worlds.