We loved Scott Blackwood‘s 2009 novel We Agreed to Meet Just Here … and we weren’t the only ones. Last week, Blackwood received a $50,000 Whiting Writers’ Award, given annually to emerging writers.
The Whiting Selection Committee singled Blackwood’s novel out for “its marvelous compression, and the elegiac, ominous yearning, the fugue of loss and love and death that pervades the book.” The former Austinite received his MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State; he now directs the Creative Writing Program at Chicago’s Roosevelt University.
Blackwood was one of four fiction writers recognized by the foundation this year; ten writers from fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting are recognized annually for their “exceptional talent and promise.” Previous recipients include Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, Deborah Eisenberg and Padgett Powell – not too shabby company to be keeping.
This article appears in The 1%.
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A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Kimberley has written about film, books, and pop culture for The Austin Chronicle since 2000. She was named Editor of the Chronicle in 2016; she previously served as the paper’s Managing Editor, Screens Editor, Books Editor, and proofreader. Her work has been awarded by the Association of Alternative Newsmedia for excellence in arts criticism, team reporting, and special section (Best of Austin). The Austin Alliance for Women...
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