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Thursday, December 8, 2005

Diana George gets $20,000

Posted by on December 8 at 12:29 PM

Seattle writer Diana George — a one-to-watch in the 2003 Stranger Genius Awards — found out yesterday that she’s been awarded $20,000 from the NEA for her fiction writing. The Literature Fellowship is “the Arts Endowment’s most direct investment in American creativity, encouraging the production of new work and allowing writers the time and means to write,” according to the website. Another Seattle writer, Matt Ruff, has also won a Literature Fellowship, alongside 50 other writers across the country (except for Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri, there aren’t many big names on the list).

The NEA also gave grants to a bunch of local organizations — 33 Fainting Spells, Empty Space, ARCADE quarterly, Northwest Film Forum, Velocity, ACT, On the Boards, Seattle Rep, Copper Canyon Press, some others… There’s a full list of Washington State grants here. But only George and Ruff got individual awards.

George, reached just now by phone says, “I feel good. I’m pretty happy.” (That’s called understatement.) She says she got the grant on the basis of a single story called “Filzbad” that’s coming out in the new Chicago Review. It’s not on newsstands yet. In the meantime, here, from our archives, are some articles she’s published in the last couple years in The Stranger: an interview she did with Gary Lutz (a favorite writer of mine, woefully underappreciated), an article on working in a funeral home, one on Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, one on Rikki Ducornet, one on difficulty, one on a mysterious suicide


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Why isn't anyone commenting on this. This is absolutely rad. Congrats Diana George!

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