Last Updated Mon, 03 May 2004
CBC News Online with files from The Arts Report
Gallant awarded $20,000 for "originality and craftsmanship"
NEW YORK - Ex-pat Canadian Mavis Gallant was among a list of PEN International's recent literary prizewinners.
The international writers' organization named the Montreal-born short story writer winner of the $20,000 US PEN/Nabokov Award for her "enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship."
The Paris-based Gallant, whose short story collections include Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories and From the Fifteenth District: A Novella and Eight Stories, started out as a feature reporter for Montreal newspapers in the mid-1940s. She wrote fiction on the side and, in 1950, decided to move to Europe and dedicate herself to writing full-time. The Governor General's Award-winner was named a Companion to the Order of Canada in 1993.
Other PEN winners included former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky, playwrights Lanford Wilson and Lynn Nottage, children's author Deborah Wiles, writer Anthony Swofford, and Jonathan Safran Foer, Will Heinrich and Monique Truong, who each won two-year fellowships of $35,000 for writers working on their second book.