The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has named 22 new MacArthur Fellows, who will receive $500,000 in "no strings attached" support over the next five years. Included among this year's "genius grant" winners are former U.S. poet laureate Kay Ryan, "whose immediately distinctive and tightly woven verse is grounded in incisive explorations of seemingly familiar language, ideas, and experiences"; Peter Hessler, who "writes with a novelist's attention to detail and structures his stories around the compelling characters he encounters"; Jacob Soll, "a historian whose meticulously researched studies of early modern Europe are shedding new light on the origins of the modern state"; and A. E. Stallings, "a poet and translator mining the classical world and traditional poetic techniques to craft works that evoke startling insights about contemporary life."
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Irish author Edna O'Brien won the €35,000 (US$48,282) Frank O'Connor prize for her short-story collection Saints and Sinners, the Guardian reported. O'Brien topped a shortlist that included Colm Tóibín, Yiyun Li, Alexander MacLeod, Suzanne Rivecca and Valerie Trueblood to win the prize, in what judging panel member Thomas McCarthy said was a "fraught" judging session: "The vote was split but everyone was happy with the decision. It seemed an apt choice."
McCarthy called O'Brien "the Solzhenitsyn of Irish life--the one who kept speaking when everyone else stopped talking about being an Irish woman. It was the magisterial honesty of her work that came across more than anything else--her ability to be both contemporary and, yes, to carry all of the wagons and trailers of Irish life over 50 years behind her."
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Jessica James's Noble Cause won the $1,000 MOSB John Esten Cooke Award for Fiction, which honors writers who portray characters and events dealing with Southern history and the Civil War in a historically accurate fashion.
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Irish author Edna O'Brien won the €35,000 (US$48,282) Frank O'Connor prize for her short-story collection Saints and Sinners, the Guardian reported. O'Brien topped a shortlist that included Colm Tóibín, Yiyun Li, Alexander MacLeod, Suzanne Rivecca and Valerie Trueblood to win the prize, in what judging panel member Thomas McCarthy said was a "fraught" judging session: "The vote was split but everyone was happy with the decision. It seemed an apt choice."
McCarthy called O'Brien "the Solzhenitsyn of Irish life--the one who kept speaking when everyone else stopped talking about being an Irish woman. It was the magisterial honesty of her work that came across more than anything else--her ability to be both contemporary and, yes, to carry all of the wagons and trailers of Irish life over 50 years behind her."
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Jessica James's Noble Cause won the $1,000 MOSB John Esten Cooke Award for Fiction, which honors writers who portray characters and events dealing with Southern history and the Civil War in a historically accurate fashion.