Isla Morley has won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, honoring outstanding women in literary fiction, for her debut novel, Come Sunday, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and now in paperback from Picador.
The Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies and the Department of English at the University of Rochester, which sponsor the award, called Come Sunday "a spellbinding drama about a woman breaking free of seemingly insurmountable grief when her three-year-old daughter is killed in a car accident and what it takes to revive hope when all seems lost."
Morley was born in South Africa and lives now in Los Angeles, Calif.
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The National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards, will award its 2010 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Tom Wolfe in recognition of his outstanding achievements as "a journalist, author, and one of the founders of the New Journalism literary movement."
The Foundation also will give the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community to Joan Ganz Cooney, a founder of Sesame Workshop (formerly known as Children's Television Workshop) and Sesame Street.
Foundation executive director Harold Augenbraum said that "the work of both Wolfe and Cooney led to enormous changes in our view of the world and took established media in new directions."
The National Book Awards will be held Wednesday, November 17, in New York.