Literary Awards by Year
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Bruce 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
...HideAdam Hochschild
2005 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction
Adam Hochschild is a writer and a founding editor of Mother Jones. His books include Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son; The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey; The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin; Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels; the acclaimed King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa; and, most recently, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves.
Hochschild is a former commentator on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” He teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and lives in San Francisco.
Adam Hochschild Bio and Cross Links
...HideAndrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War
2005 Lannan Literary Award for An Especially Notable Book
Andrew Bacevich has said, “War, we must always remind ourselves, is the continuation of politics by other means. Understanding any war requires first understanding that war’s political basis. What brings the parties into conflict? What are they fighting for?” Bacevich’s books include The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism and The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War which received the inaugural Lannan Literary Award for An Especially Notable Book in 2005.
His essays and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of scholarly and general interest publications including The Wilson Quarterly, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The American Conservative, and The New Republic. His op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today, among other newspapers. He is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, and received his PhD in American Diplomatic History from Princeton University. Before joining the faculty of Boston University in 1998, he taught at West Point and Johns Hopkins University. Bacevich is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War Bio and Cross Links
...HideDavid G. Campbell
2005 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction
David G. Campbell, scientist, educator and author, joined the scientific staff of the New York Botanical Garden after earning a PhD at Johns Hopkins. He spent eight years in the field in the Brazilian Amazon conducting research on the biogeography of trees. In 1987 he joined the sixth Brazilian expedition to Antarctica, studying the life cycles and pathologies of the invertebrate parasites of crustaceans, fish and seals.
He is the author of The Ephemeral Islands: A Natural History of the Bahamas; The Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica; Islands in Space and Time, and most recently, A Land of Ghosts: The Braided Lives of People and the Forest in Far Western Amazonia. He is currently Professor of Biology at Grinnell College in Iowa.
David G. Campbell 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
...HideGilbert Sorrentino
2005 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award
Gilbert Sorrentino, “like a reckless heir to Borges, Barthelme and Groucho Marx, co-opts the language of critical discourse to subvert his audience’s preconceptions and, in so doing, redraws the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ art” (The New York Times). For much of the 1950’s and 60’s, Sorrentino published literary journals and magazines and in 1965 took a job at Grove Press where his first editing assignment was Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Sorrentino’s first novel, The Sky Changes, was published in 1966, and over 20 titles of fiction and poetry have followed. In 1973, Sorrentino published his most commercially successful work, Mulligan Stew. Of his novel, Blue Pastoral, the Atlantic Monthly says, “Sorrentino demonstrates, with a steady flow of puns, parodies, misquotations (deliberate), incorrect historical references (ditto), and hideous verse (presumably also ditto), that the country abounds in foolishness.”
Gilbert Sorrentino 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 that are informed by a broad knowledge of science. 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 fourteen books of poetry including her newest collection Wayfare. Firekeeper: Selected Poems (2005), Generations (2004), and Song of the World Becoming: New and Collected Poems, 1981-2001 are some of her others. Her 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
...HideNadeem Aslam
2005 Lannan Literary Fellowship
Nadeem Aslam was born in Pakistan and immigrated with his family to Great Britain at the age of fourteen. He now lives in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, in northern England.
His first novel, Season of the Rainbirds, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Best First Novel Award and the Mail on Sunday/John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize; it won the Betty Trask Award and the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award. It was also on the longlist for the Booker Prize. His second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers, was awarded the Kiriyama Prize in fiction and the British Society of Author’s 2005 Encore Prize for best second novel. He is currently at work on a third novel, about America’s war on terror.
Nadeem Aslam Bio and Cross Links
...HideJudy Budnitz
2005 Lannan Literary Fellowship
Judy Budnitz’s stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines including The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, and McSweeney’s, and she is the recipient of an O. Henry Award and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
She is the author of, most recently, Nice Big American Baby, and Flying Leap, which was a New York Times Notable Book in 1998. Her novel, If I Told You Once, won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award in the United States and was short-listed for the Orange Prize in the United Kingdom. She lives in San Francisco and is at Princeton University for the Fall 2005 semester as a Council of the Humanities Fellow.
Judy Budnitz Bio and Cross Links
...HideFreeman House
2005 Lannan Literary Fellowship
Freeman House is a former commercial salmon fisher who has been involved with a community-based watershed restoration effort in northern California for more than twenty-five years. He is a co-founder of the Mattole Salmon Group and the Mattole Restoration Council.
His book, Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species received the best nonfiction award from the San Francisco Bay Area Book Reviewers Association and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for quality of prose.
Freeman House Bio and Cross Links
...HideRikki Ducornet
2004 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction
Rikki Ducornet, a cosmopolitan and intellectual artist, has lived in North Africa, South America, France, and Canada. Of her most recent book, Gazelle, the Washington Post writes, “[It] is a sensuous book. A mix of smells pervades its pages, from orange blossoms, perfumes, mint, almonds, limes, roses, jasmine, and long-simmered delicacies to animal dung, vinegar, urine, and long-buried mummies. Great stand-alone sentences are enough to make one’s mouth water.”
Rikki Ducornet Bio and Cross Links
...HidePeter Reading
2004 Lannan Literary Award for Poetry
Mr. Reading was born in Liverpool, England, in 1947 and studied painting at the Liverpool College of Art. He is one of the most inventive and challenging poets in England. His language is brilliantly original, compassionate, and laced with acid humor. Mr. Reading was the first writer to hold a one-year writing Lannan residency in Marfa, Texas. In June of 1999 Mr. Reading read from his work composed during his residency, as part of Readings & Conversations.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in his native England. Reading is one of Britain’s most controversial poets: angry, gruesomely ironic, hilarious, heartbreaking, and prolific. His work is experimental, playing with formal traditions of English in liberating ways, and he has produced a body of work that is frequently interrelated across book titles. His poetry has been collected into three volumes by Bloodaxe (UK) and critical assessments of his work have been written by Neil Roberts, Sean O’Brien, and Anthony Thwaite. “Anger is a country Peter Reading has been colonising for years. . .his anger is expressed with classical clarity. Rage against the state of the nation, yes, but also rage against the darkness of death, exile, and inability to show love.” – The Observer (London)
Peter Reading Bio and Cross Links
...HideRebecca Seiferle
2004 Lannan Literary Fellowship
Rebecca Seiferle has published three books of poetry, is editor/publisher of the literary website, The Drunken Boat, and is a noted translator of major poets from the Spanish language tradition. After many years on staff at San Juan Community College in Farmington, NM, she is currently teaching at Brandeis University.
Her first book, The Ripped-Out Seam, was published in 1993 to great acclaim and her second, The Music We Dance To, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and the 1998 Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her latest collection, Bitters, was published in 2001 and won a Pushcart Prize and the Western States Book Award.
Rebecca Seiferle Bio and Cross Links
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