Winners
“I wrote The Right Hand of Sleep in a futile attempt to get my first girlfriend to take me back; Canaan’s Tongue was largely written as a way of venting my horror at the turn that the country had taken in 2001. The question of who Lowboy was written for is harder to answer. In a way, I suppose, I was writing it for anybody who would listen.” —John Wray, “How to Write on the Subway”
“The place of women in the literary world is still as urgent an issue as it has ever been. I worry that other women of my generation, having taken their admission to this world as a natural right, have grown as complacent as I have been. But admission is not the same thing as acceptance. And what the reception of literature by women over the last few decades—longer, of course, but let’s keep to a manageable scope—shows us is that acceptance is a long way off.”
—Ruth Franklin, “Why the Literary Landscape Continues to Disadvantage Women”
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Both Wray and Franklin are the recipients of a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship and a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellowship. They are working on, respectively, The Lost Time Accidents, a novel about a family of renegade physicists, and Household Spirits, a biography of American author Shirley Jackson.
