Kathryn Davis, the Fannie M. Hurst Senior Fiction Writer in The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, has won a $150,000 Lannan Foundation Literary Award.
Presented annually, the Lannan Literary Awards honor “established and emerging writers whose work is of exceptional quality.”
“In six extraordinary novels, Davis has bent and inventively explored the novel form itself,” noted Jo Chapman, literary program officer for the Lannan Foundation. “She is an unconventional, challenging and daring writer.”
David Lawton, Ph.D., professor and chair of English in Arts & Sciences, said of Davis: “Kathryn’s work is a series of thrilling contradictions: witty and engaged, surreal and sharply perceptive. She’s incapable of writing a dull sentence, yet she never writes a mannered one; and she makes her readers look at a highly particular world with astonishment, human recognition and concern. Whether in 18th-century France or a modern American small town, she persuades us that she is showing the inside of people’s lives, an interiority that extends to home and animals. We are truly fortunate to have Kathryn as our senior fiction writer.”
Davis’ work is critically acclaimed. Her debut, Labrador (1988), examines the relationship between two sisters coming of age in 1960s New Hampshire, while The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf (1993) explores the unlikely friendship between a Danish composer and a struggling waitress in upstate New York. Hell: A Novel (1998), set largely in 1950s Philadelphia, intertwines the story of a suburban family with the lives of Edwina Moss, a 19th-century writer on domestic management, and Antonin Careme, Napoleon’s chef.
Davis’ fourth novel, The Walking Tour (1999), follows a pair of cyber-entrepreneurs and their wives as they explore the Welsh countryside. In Versailles (2002), Davis tells the story of Marie Antoinette, as narrated by her ghost. Davis’ most recent book, The Thin Place (2006), explores a small New England village that is shaken by a young girl’s mysterious unearthly power.
“I’m interested in the plight of a character embarked on a journey through an utterly unfamiliar — and frequently fantastic — landscape,” Davis has said of her work. “The quest itself has never interested me as much as the chance to describe that other world.”
Raised in Philadelphia, Davis studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and Columbia University in New York before graduating from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vt.
She previously taught at Goddard and at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
David came to Washington University in 2005 as a visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences. She was appointed senior fiction writer in January 2006. She divides her time between St. Louis and Vermont.
Davis has received several prestigious literary awards, including a 1988 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Labrador, the 1999 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship.
The Lannan Foundation — based in Santa Fe, N.M., and Santa Monica, Calif. — was founded in 1960 by the late entrepreneur and financier J. Patrick Lannan and is dedicated to preserving the wholeness, clarity and strength of the English language.
In addition to the Literary Awards, the foundation offers fellowships, underwrites grants to non-profit organizations, presents a literary reading series, and sponsors the Lannan Writing Residency in Marfa, Texas.
In 1997, William H. Gass, Ph.D., the David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities in Arts & Sciences, won a $100,000 Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award for his fiction and essays.