There is no shortage of book awards presented each year—the next in line are The Quills Awards (of which PW is a sponsoring partner). The Quill is different than other awards in that the public is invited to cast a vote (see sidebar on p. 26). Do awards make a difference? We've asked nine recent winners of awards—from the NBA to the NBCC to the Orange Prize to Newberys and Caldecotts and Quills—how being a prize recipient has affected them. It is clear that in a writer's life, the impact is considerable and welcome.
Ann Patchett
It's fairly well-known that Ann Patchett won the Orange Prize for her fourth novel, Bel Canto. It's less well-known that she lost it, just a few years before that, for her third novel, The Magician's Assistant.
“You tell yourself the story that everybody tells themselves,” says Patchett, speaking from her home in Nashville, Tenn. “It's an honor just to be nominated, it's wonderful to be in the company of such great writers. And it's all true. And you lose, and it's fine.
“But when you win,” she continues, “you realize, 'Oh, it really is much better to win.' ”
Patchett, a Tennessee resident since age five and the author of six books—Harper will release Run in October—also won the Pen/Faulkner for Bel Canto, an epic-in-minature about a fancy party in an unnamed South American country that gets taken hostage by anti-government terrorists.
“There's a very different dynamic between the two,” Patchett says. “The Orange is almost like a beauty pageant, in that they bring out all the finalists on stage together to announce the award. And you're together all week so that by that time you're very close, and they announce the winners, and you're up there clapping and saying, 'Oh, my, I'm really glad you won.' You're very publicly winning and losing.
“With the Pen/Faulkner, they tell you a few weeks in advance, and that's lovely. I was alone and it was night and it was a phone call.” She sighs, remembering. “I went to 12 years of Catholic school, and I have a very genuine sense that you must be perceived as humble, you should just keep your head down and take no pleasure in the win. So I got to hang up the phone and scream and hop up and down like a piece of popcorn.”
Even before it won any awards, Bel Canto was a bestseller with near-universal acclaim, a surefire career-changer. But it was her wins that gave her the kind of satisfaction and recognition she'd sought: “I think that's the reward I've always dreamed of. I've always wanted to be taken seriously in the literary arena.”
Not that she didn't make a sincere attempt to cash in: “The really great thing about the Orange Award is that they bet on you. You can go to a booking agent and bet on the award. And I had the worst odds, they always give long odds to the American. We kept trying to bet on me, but the booking agencies kept weird hours. That would have been some great money.”—Marc Schultz
Louis Sachar
Winner of the Newbery and a National Book Award for Young People's Literature—both for his 1998 Holes—Louis Sachar found his inspiration for his first children's book in a fitting place: an elementary school. While attending the University of California at Berkeley, he took a job for college credit working as a teacher's aide, which was for him a life-changing experience. When he graduated in 1976 he decided to write a children's book based on the students he had worked with. Sideways Stories from Wayside School was accepted by a publisher during the author's first week of law school.
“I had always thought of being a writer, but until I worked at the school, the idea of writing children's books had never entered the equation,” says Sachar. “I decided I'd write one children's book, thinking perhaps that would open doors for me. But I found that I liked writing for children.” Sachar eventually abandoned his part-time legal work to write full-time and went on to pen more than 20 other novels for youngsters, including There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom; the Marvin Redpost series; Wayside School Is Falling Down; Holes and its companion novel, Small Steps.
When Holes was published, the novel received excellent reviews and, Sachar recalls: “People told me that it might win the Newbery. That was the last thing I wanted to hear or to expect, since I didn't want to jinx it. And I didn't want anyone to base how good my book was by whether or not it won an award, though of course I was very glad to win it.” Clinching the Newbery has not changed how the author approaches his writing, but it has, he notes, changed how people describe him: “I am now called 'Newbery Award—winning Louis Sachar,' so it seems to add more credibility to what I do—but not in my own mind.”—Sally Lodge
John Grogan
It's nice to meet an author who admits that a literary award like the Quill is important to him. “Winning meant a lot,” John Grogan, author of the bestselling Marley & Me (William Morrow/HarperCollins), tells PW. “It's a popular vote... [and] in many ways it's a recognition of how loyal your fan base is. I really did take it as a validation that my story was resonating with people around the country. The Quills do a lot of great work in promoting literacy. I think it's a great venue for publicizing the need for everyday Americans to get involved in helping our fellow citizens who don't know how to read.”
Grogan really wanted to win in the Biography/Memoir category—and he did, beating out the likes of Joan Didion and Anderson Cooper. What came as a shock was also winning in the Audio Book category. “I was so surprised about the Audio,” Grogan says. “If I remember right, Frank McCourt was in that category [for Teacher Man] and who can say a story out loud better than Frank McCourt? So when they announced my name it was one of those 'holy shit' moments,” he recalls with a hearty laugh. “Oh, my God, I don't have anything to say.”
Asked if there are any more Marleys scheduled for the future, Grogan enthusiastically replies, “Yes, there are. I am now in the process right now of writing a second Marley picture book in the series. Bad Dog, Marley! came out in May and I'm doing a follow-up book that will come out, I believe, for the holidays of 2008. It's a picture book for 3—7-year-olds.”—Dermot McEvoy
Julia Glass
For Julia Glass, winning the National Book Award in 2002 for her novel Three Junes (Pantheon) was, in her words, “a fairy tale.” The book, which PW described as “a dazzling portrait of family life,” catapulted her name and her book into the literary limelight—and very definitely changed her life.
“Three Junes was my first novel,” Glass recalls during a phone interview from her home near Boston. “I was 46, and the best expectation for the book was that it would be very well received critically, sell decently and be a nice groundwork for my career. But I was in no way favored to the win the award. I remember enjoying being a finalist so much that I wished it would go on and on. I know my publisher was shocked when I won—maybe as much as I was.”
Shocked and richer, in more ways than the obvious one. “There's no guarantee that an award means you're going to sell lots of books,” she says, “but Three Junes really took off with book groups and independent booksellers after the award.” Five years later, the book is still selling well, and the financial security it provided enabled her to buy her first home. But Glass seems equally pleased by the less tangible benefits of winning the National Book Award.
“One of the surprise dividends was getting to meet authors I really admired,” she says. “Now I can talk shop with writers like Richard Russo. I got to watch the Preakness with Jane Smiley—that was a blast! Opening the door to writers who were heroes to me was the biggest surprise of winning.... I felt I'd finally found my tribe.”
Glass finished her second novel in 2006 (The Whole World Over, Pantheon) and she's working on a collection of linked stories due out in 2008. “There's a lot of anxiety associated with a big prize,” she says. “But would I trade it for anything? No!” —Tim Peters
Debbie Macomber
Prolific romance novelist and 2005 Quill winner for her novel 44 Cranberry Point (Mira), Debbie Macomber sees winning a Quill Award as a way of focusing positive attention on books in general and, of course, her own work. She cites the bridge the award creates between her and her readers as the most important part of winning: “It was truly a career highlight—a real honor. I'm especially pleased that the ultimate judges were readers themselves. ”
The recognition that book awards provide, according to Macomber, brings a kind of attention to writers that they would not normally recieve in the book world: “Because the craft of writing is for the most part a solitary occupation, and writers generally receive little media and popular recognition, we need to celebrate every award.” —Craig Morgan Teicher
Jeffrey Eugenides
Jeffrey Eugenides didn't believe it when a young photographer told him he'd just won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex. It was April 2003, and Eugenides was at a hotel in Prague, where he was attending a literary festival. “It seemed very unlikely that he would be the messenger of such news,” Eugenides recalls. But the photographer insisted he'd been sent to take a picture of the American writer. Canadian author Yann Martel, also there for the festival, checked the hotel's computer to find out if the photographer was right. “As he was doing that,” Eugenides remembers, “all the phones in the hotel began to ring and suddenly the waiter at the hotel was bringing out champagne and all of a sudden these Greek women came up and started kissing me. The memory is very vivid.”
The hoopla surrounding the announcement certainly brought Eugenides out of the daily grind: “An award like that is the opposite of what the life of a daily writer is,” he says now. “It's a moment of public recognition and festivity—a kind of lightness and celebration that's not a part of what writing a book is like.”
Eugenides was well-known before winning the Pulitzer; his debut novel, The Virgin Suicides (1993), was a critical and commercial success, and Sofia Coppola later adapted it into a film. Ten years later, he published his second novel, Middlesex (2002), the story of a Greek-American girl who becomes a teenage boy in 1970s Detroit. In addition to winning the Pulitzer, Middlesex received a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination. And in June of this year, Oprah Winfrey selected it for her summer book club. According to Nielsen BookScan, Middlesex has sold more than 1.3 million copies in hardcover and paperback. Looking back, the authors says that after winning the Putlitzer, he was viewed “slightly differently” in a certain public realm. Yet, he admits, “winning has little do with my daily writing life, which remains as difficult, lonely and arduous as ever.”
Eugenides recently moved to Princeton from Chicago. He will begin teaching undergraduates in the fall and is at work on another novel. Talking to PW on a summer Friday morning while making oatmeal, he muses on how some writers find winning big prizes like the Pulitzer onerous. “But,” he says, “I haven't found it to be a terrible burden. I certainly was happy to get it and happy for others to get it after me.” —Lynn Andriani
Nathaniel Mackey
For most poets, book sales are never very high, and toiling in obscurity is just par for the course, even for a successful poet. Winning a major book award, though, can summon a kind of attention most versifiers aren't used to. Since winning the 2006 National Book Award for poetry for has latest collection, Splay Anthem, published by New Directions, Nathaniel Mackey has noticed that “it's brought my work to the attention of people and readers who probably would not have otherwise been aware of it. Something like the National Book Award is news, so it gets wide attention.”
And what does “wide attention” mean for a poet, especially for one like Mackey, who writes challenging, experimental poems, poetic sequences and novels? “Mainstream media—or media that is more mainstream than the kind of poetry venues that I'm usually associated with—have shown some attention to my work,” says Mackey. “Things ranging from getting an invitation to send poetry to the New York Times and being interviewed on Tavis Smiley's radio program were direct results of the award, as well as more local stuff: articles in the San Francisco Chronicle and that kind of thing. It certainly seems to have had an impact on sales of Splay Anthem,” says Mackey, which is now in its third printing and has sold 8,000 copies.
Mackey has a sober and practical view of the purpose of book awards: “These awards are publicity vehicles and marketing vehicles, and the National Book Foundation explicitly makes a point of that. Certainly the publishers make use of that, and New Directions is no exception. Publishers see that sort of thing as a feather in their cap.” Mackey's next book, on the back cover of which “there is reference to me as a national book award winner,” he notes, is a novel called Bass Cathedral, coming from New Directions next January.
More importantly, perhaps, Mackey says he's “going on with my writing, which doesn't get any easier.” —Craig Morgan Teicher
Julie Phillips
There are few tasks as exhausting and thankless as researching and writing a good biography. Julie Phillips readily acknowledges the joy and relief she felt upon receiving the National Book Critics Circle Award for her biography, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, a project that consumed seven years of Phillips's life. “It was wonderful to emerge from that long tunnel of work and have someone tell me it was worth doing,” Phillips says. “And the award came from the people I'd like most to belong to—the book reviewers and public intellectuals. I felt like I'd been away for a long time and I was being welcomed back.”
That sense of departure and return is quite literal. Phillips got her start reviewing for Newsday and the Women's Review of Books. Now living in Amsterdam and working on a new biographical project, she's returning to her roots. “I'm writing for Newsday again, for Ms., I just had my first review in the Washington Post Book World, and I've been writing for one of the Dutch papers, Trouw, as their American literature expert,” Phillips says. “It's fun to be someone's idea of an expert.”
Phillips acknowledges that translating awards into a feeling of acceptance and welcome makes her quite the opposite of her biographical subject, Sheldon, who hated winning awards. “She felt that she couldn't enjoy writing anymore,” Phillips explains, “because people expected too much of her—she expected too much of herself.” In contrast, Phillips seems content to put the NBCC award on her shelf and let the next project create its own destiny, though she adds, “I don't know yet whether the award will make my new work easier for me or harder.”—Rose Fox
Christopher Paul Curtis
Christopher Paul Curtis was working in a warehouse just outside Detroit when he sent publishers the manuscript for his first novel, the 1996 Newbery Honor—winning The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 (Delacorte). “One minute I'd think it was good,” he remembers, “but the next I'd think it was an embarrassment and that I'd better call those people and get it back.
“It's hard to generalize about writers,” Curtis continues, “but one generalization I can make is that writers lack confidence. Most of us don't think, Wow, this is good!' Well, you might for just a minute but then you think, This is crap.”
Winning a major award for his first book breathed confidence into Curtis. “Receiving an award lets you think that you can do this.Especially an award like a Newbery, which is given by librarians. Who reads more than a librarian?
“Having the stamp of the Newbery Honor and the Coretta Scott King Honor [which Watsons also received] took me to a whole other level. There are a lot of good children's books out there, but you have to have exposure. Getting the Newbery Honor gave me that exposure; and it got me in the schools and libraries.”
Not long after the Newbery Honors were announced, a school principal called Curtis and asked him to speak to his students, apologetically offering a fee of “only” $300. “Only $300 for an hour's talk! That's what I was making for a whole week at the warehouse,” says Curtis. Within a year, Curtis's earnings from speaking engagements and royalty checks enabled him to write full time.
Curtis's career rose even higher with Bud, Not Buddy (Delacorte), winner of the 2000 Newbery Medal. “Winning the Newbery puts you everywhere. Any librarian, any teacher who is on her toes is going to read it and maybe even use it in her class.”
“The Honor gave me confidence, and the Medal iced the cake. When I say to myself, And you call yourself a writer? I can say, Well, I won a Newbery, didn't I?” —Elizabeth Devereaux
|
