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 20 years, Lannan Foundation, through its Awards and Fellowships program, has awarded 173 writers and poets more than $13 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.
Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk, Belarus (former Soviet Union) in 1981. Her first collection, I’m as Thin as Your Eyelashes, was published prior to her moving to the U.S. in 2005. Her first US poetry collection is Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), co-translated by the husband-and-wife team of Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright. The book has been translated into Swedish and Russian. It is the first Belarusian-English poetry book ever published in the U.S.
Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1958, the poet Sarah Lindsay works as a copy editor and proofreader in Greensboro, North Carolina. She is the author of Primate Behavior (Grove Press Poetry Series, 1997) which was a finalist for the National Book Award; Mount Clutter (Grove Press Poetry Series, 2002); and Twigs and Knucklebones (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). A graduate of St. Olaf College and the