Literary Awards by Year
Anne Stevenson
2007 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award
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.
Anne Stevenson Bio and Cross Links
...HideA. L. Kennedy
2007 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction
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.”
A. L. Kennedy Bio and Cross Links
...HideSusan Straight
2007 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction
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.
Susan Straight Bio and Cross Links
...HideMike Davis
2007 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction
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.
Mike Davis Bio and Cross Links
...HidePaula Gunn Allen
2007 Lannan Literary Fellowship
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.
Paula Gunn Allen Bio and Cross Links
...HideDaniel Alarcón
2007 Lannan Literary Fellowship
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 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award. The British journal Granta recently named him one of the Best Young American Novelists. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship (2001), a Whiting Award (2004), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007). He lives in Oakland, California, and his first novel, Lost City Radio, was published in February 2007.
Daniel Alarcón Bio and Cross Links
...HideEdie Meidav
2007 Lannan Literary Fellowship
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.
Edie Meidav Bio and Cross Links
...HideDinaw Mengestu
2007 Lannan Literary Fellowship
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 MFA program in fiction, Mengestu has written for many publications. He recently reported stories for Harper’s and Jane magazine, profiling a young woman who was kidnapped and forced to become a soldier in the brutal war in Uganda, and for Rolling Stone on the tragedy in Darfur. His first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (titled Children of the Revolution in Britain), has been nominated for The Guardian First Book Award in the U.K. and the Prix Femina Étranger in France, and earned him a place as one of the U.S. National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” for 2007. He is also the recipient of a 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Dinaw Mengestu Bio and Cross Links
...HideSineád Morrissey
2007 Lannan Literary Fellowship
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.
Sineád Morrissey Bio and Cross Links
...HideJeremy Scahill
2007 Lannan Literary Fellowship
Jeremy Scahill is an international journalist who has reported from post-invasion Iraq, from the former Yugoslavia where he covered the 1999 NATO bombing, and from post-Katrina Louisiana where he exposed the presence of Blackwater mercenaries. His reporting sparked a Congressional inquiry and an internal Department of Homeland Security investigation. He is a correspondent for the national radio and television show Democracy Now! and a frequent contributor to The Nation magazine. He is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army (2007) is his first book.
Jeremy Scahill Bio and Cross Links
...HideBruce Weigl
2006 Lannan Literary Award for Poetry
Bruce Weigl is the author of 12 collections of poetry, most recently Declension in the Village of Chung Luong which created “an eloquent spokesman for an entire generation of Americans whose lives were broken by the war and a country whose moral confusion desperately needed addressing.” His memoir, The Circle of Hahn, tells of his childhood in Ohio; his induction into the U.S. Army in 1967, and year in Vietnam that led to his passion for that country’s poetry and culture; and of a redemptive meeting in 1996 with his daughter-to-be at an orphanage outside Hanoi. He also has three collections of essays as well as translating and publishing books of Vietnamese poetry. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harpers, and many other publications. In 2006 he was awarded a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
Bruce Weigl Bio and Cross Links
...HideKathryn Davis
2006 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction
Of her work, Kathryn Davis has said, “I’m interested in the plight of a character embarked on a journey through an utterly unfamiliar (and frequently fantastic) landscape…. The quest itself has never interested me as much as the chance to describe that other world.” In six extraordinary novels, Davis has bent and inventively explored the novel form itself. She is an unconventional, challenging, and daring writer.
Davis lives in Vermont, has taught at Skidmore College, and was recently appointed senior fiction writer in the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. She is a recipient of the Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her novels are Labrador (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1988); The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf (Knopf, 1993); Hell; (Ecco, 1998) The Walking Tour (Houghton Miflin, 1999); Versailles (Houghton Miflin, 2002); The Thin Place (Little, Brown, 2006).
Kathryn Davis Bio and Cross Links
...HideTim Flannery
2006 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction
Tim Flannery is on a mission. He believes human activity is drastically altering the earth’s climate, and in time these changes will have a devastating effect. In The Weather Makers: How Man is Changing the Climate and What it Means for Life on Earth, he traces the story of climate change over millions of years and exposes the substantial, human-induced impact and likely effects if this process continues. He then proposes a plan to halt, and ultimately reverse, this trend. The book has been published in 32 countries and has played a key role in international discussion of the issue. A regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement, Flannery also contributes to NPR and the BBC.
Tim Flannery Bio and Cross Links
...HideChris Hedges
2006 Lannan Literary Fellowship
Chris Hedges, currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. He is the author of the best-selling War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (Public Affairs, 2002), which was a finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. Hedges was part of The New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. His most recent book is Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America (Free Press, 2005). Hedges is also the author of What Every Person Should Know About War (Free Press, 2003) and will publish American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press) in January 2007.
Chris Hedges Bio and Cross Links
...HideElizabeth Kolbert
2006 Lannan Literary Fellowship
Elizabeth Kolbert’s first book, The Prophet of Love and Other Tales of Power and Deceit (Bloomsbury, 2004), profiles a range of New Yorkers from politicians to policemen to bureaucrats. For her second book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change (Bloomsbury, 2006), Kolbert traveled from Alaska to Greenland, and visited top scientists, to get to the heart of the debate over global warming. Growing out of a groundbreaking three-part series in The New Yorker, her book brings the environment into the consciousness of the American people and asks what, if anything, can be done, and how we can save our planet. Kolbert has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1999 and has written dozens of pieces for the magazine, including profiles of Senator Hillary Clinton, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Her stories have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and Mother Jones, and have been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Political Writing. She is a graduate of Yale University. In 2006, she was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship.
Elizabeth Kolbert Bio and Cross Links
...HideCharles C. Mann
2006 Lannan Literary Fellowship
Charles C. Mann is a correspondent for Science and The Atlantic Monthly, and his most recent book is 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Knopf, 2005). In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus. Mann has co-written four books including Noah’s Choice: The Future of Endangered Species (Knopf, 1995) and The Second Creation (Macmillan, 1986). A three-time National Magazine Award finalist, he has won awards from the American Bar Association, the Margaret Sanger Foundation, the American Institute of Physics, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, among others. His writing was selected for The Best American Science Writing 2003 and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003.
Charles C. Mann Bio and Cross Links
...HidePeter Orner
2006 Lannan Literary Fellowship
Peter Orner’s first book was Esther Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 2001) a well-received collection of 34 stories about which writer and critic Margot Livesay said in The New York Times, “Orner doesn’t simply bring his characters to life, he gives them souls.” His second book is the funny, brilliant, and lyrical novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown, 2006). Similar in construction to his story collection, some of the chapters are just a page, in the novel Orner offers an extraordinary cast of characters, including Mavala Shikongo, a former guerrilla, through whose past we learn the often violent history of Namibia. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and Best American Stories . Orner has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Born in Chicago, he currently lives in San Francisco.
Peter Orner Bio and Cross Links
...HideBrian Turner
2006 Lannan Literary Fellowship
Brian Turner is a soldier-poet whose debut book of poems, Here, Bullet, won the New York Times “Editor’s Choice” selection. His poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review and other journals, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology. Here, Bullet is a harrowing, beautiful first-person account of the Iraq war featuring poems that reflect Turner’s experiences as a soldier. The poems speak with compassion, sympathy, and horror of the first-hand experience of war and with immediacy of loss, beauty, comradeship, and longing for home and the familiar; he deplores the violence and acknowledges the grief and terror of war.
Brian Turner Bio and Cross Links
...HideFrank X Walker
2005 Lannan Literary Fellowship
Frank X Walker is a co-founder of the Affrilachian Poets and teaches at Eastern Kentucky University. He was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship in 2005. His poetry books include Buffalo Dance:The Journey of York and the recent Black Box. Mr. Walker is a native of Danville, KY, and is the editor of Eclipsing a Nappy New Millennium. He lives in Cincinnati, OH.
Frank X Walker Bio and Cross Links
...HidePattiann Rogers
2005 Lannan Literary Award for Poetry
Pattiann Rogers is considered one of America’s finest contemporary poets, writing densely detailed, thickly textured poems describing the natural world and one’s place in it. In the tradition of Emerson, Whitman, and Oliver, Rogers’s wise and complex poems read like a series of witty but deeply felt explorations of the physical world and the presence of the divine.
She is the author of twelve books of poetry including her newest collection Firekeeper: Selected Poems (2005), Generations (2004), and Song of the World Becoming: New and Collected Poems, 1981-2001. Prior awards include two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Award, the Tietjens Prize and the Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine, and four Pushcart Prizes. She lives with her husband, a retired geophysicist, in Colorado.
Pattiann Rogers Bio and Cross Links
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