Winner of the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Guess which famous, historical author only earned $1,838 per year at her day job (yes, this is adjusted for inflation). Then check out the new Virginia Woolf archive, and see who won this year’s PEN/Faulkner and Dan David awards.
- Writers are generally known as a broke bunch, but Paper Cuts points out writers today are making more than several of their historical counterparts with “real jobs.” Today’s median annual salary of full-time writers and authors is over $50,000, whereas Franz Kafka (who did legal work for an insurance company) earned $40,000 per year (adjusted for inflation). Women writers have come especially far–as a governess, Emily Bronte made only $1,838 per year! Good thing writing doesn’t require much capital investment.
- Cambridge University has opened a new archive that includes letters and diaries from the Bloomsbury group, including Virginia Woolf, Rosamond Lehmann, Frances Partridge, Lytton Strachey, EM Forster, and JM Keynes. The letters surrounding the time of Virginia Woolf’s death are particularly intriguing. Jacket Copy gives excerpts and calls the letters “an intimate look at what it was like for friends and family of Woolf in the weeks between her disappearance and when her body was finally discovered.”
- This year’s PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction was announced yesterday, with Sherman Alexie’s War Dance beating out fellow finalists Lorrie Moore, Barbara Kingsolver, Lorraine M. Lopez, and Colson Whitehead for the $15,000 prize (and priceless bragging rights). Yesterday was also a big day for Margaret Atwood who, along with Indian author Amitav Ghosh, won Tel Aviv University’s Dan David Prize. This year’s category was “Literature: Rendition of the 20th Century,” and Atwood and Ghosh will have to share the measly, $1-million prize. Quill and Quire has more info.
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