Joshua Cohen, Patricia Lockwood, and Kirstin Valdez Quade are among the most prominent recipients of the Academy of Arts and Letters annual awards in literature.
The prizes, announced last Friday, honor poets, playwrights, novelists, and other writers, with prize money totaling more than $200,000. Patricia Lockwood, a Kirkus Prize finalist for her 2017 memoir, Priestdaddy, received a $10,000 award given to “a writer of progressive, original, and experimental tendencies.” Kirstin Valdez Quade’s novel, The Five Wounds, received a $10,000 prize given to a “young writer of considerable literary talent for a work published in 2021.”
Edith Grossman, whose translations from the Spanish include Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera and an acclaimed 2003 version of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, won the Academy’s $20,000 Thornton Wilder prize for translation. Joshua Cohen, author of the novel The Netanyahus, received $10,000 for “a writer whose work merits recognition for the quality of its prose style.”
In addition, Jackie Polzin’s novel Brood received $5,000 for a work of debut fiction, and novelist-essayist Lynne Tillman received $20,000 for demonstrated “achievements and dedication to the literary profession.” Other writers honored include poet Stephen Dobyns and playwright Martyna Majok.
Candidates for the prizes are nominated from the Academy’s 300 members and selected by its award committee, which this year included Amy Hempel, Louise Glück, John Guare, Edward Hirsch, Sigrid Nunez, Caryl Phillips, and Joy Williams.
The awards will be presented at a ceremony in New York in May.
Mark Athitakis is a journalist in Phoenix who writes about books for Kirkus, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere.
