The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced the winners of the organization’s 2016 literary awards. More than $500,000 in prize money was distributed to 13 talented writers. Check out the full list of winners below!
The American Academy of Arts and Letters is an honor society that promotes literature and the arts. It’s quite the prestigious organization: it was founded more than a century ago by a group that included the likes of Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson.
There are some familiar faces among this year’s honorees. The winners included Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has already won a National Book Award for his work in 2015, as well as Kirstin Valdez Quade, who just won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Other winners include Rachel Kushner and Anthony Marra. You can check out the complete list of prizes and winners below.
Benjamin H. Danks Award
$20,000 given every three years to an exceptional young playwright
E.M. Forster Award
$20,000 to a young writer from the United Kingdom or Ireland for a stay in the United States
Sinéad Morrissey of Ireland
Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction
$5,000 for a work of first fiction (novel or short stories) published in 2015.
Kirstin Valdez Quade for Night at the Fiestas
Award of Merit Medal
$25,000 to an outstanding poet
Katherine Anne Porter Award
$20,000 to a prose writer
American Academy in Rome Fellowships in Literature
A one-year (2016-2017) residency at the American Academy in Rome
John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize: Jack Livings
Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize: Matthew Neill Null
Rosenthal Family Foundation Award
$10,000 to a young writer of considerable literary talent for a work published in 2015
Anthony Marra for The Tsar of Love and Techno
Mildred and Harold Strauss Livings
$200,000 to each of two writers to enable them to devote time exclusively to writing
Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award
$20,000 to a writer whose work merits recognition for the quality of its prose style
Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation
$20,000 to a practitioner, scholar, or patron who has made a significant contribution to the art of literary translation
Jamey Gambrell
Morton Dauwen Zabel Award
$10,000 to a fiction writer with progressive, original, and experimental tendencies