Rajiv Joseph Wins Whiting Award for Playwriting

The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation today named ten recipients of the 2009 Whiting Writers' Awards. The awards, which are $50,000 each, totaling $500,000, have been given annually since 1985 to writers with exceptional talent and promise in early career.  This years recipient of the Whiting Award for playwriting went to Rajiv Joseph.

Rajiv Joseph is the author of Animals Out of Paper, produced at the Second Stage Theatre and published by Dramatists Play Service; Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, produced at the Center Theatre Group's Kirk Douglas Theater in Los Angeles and named Outstanding New American Play by the National Endowment for the Arts; and Gruesome Playground Injuries, scheduled for production in 2010 at the Alley Theatre in Houston and at Washington's Woolly Mammoth Theatre. He has received a Paula Vogel Award from the Vineyard Theatre and has been a Kesselring, a Lark Playwriting, and a Dramatists Guild fellow. Mr. Joseph received his BA from Miami University and his MFA from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. He is a founding member of the Fire Department Theater Company and lecturer in NYU's Expository Writing Program. He served for three years in the Peace Corps in Senegal and now lives in Brooklyn.

The program, which marks its 25th anniversary this year, has awarded more than $6 million to 250 poets, fiction and nonfiction writers, and playwrights. Among the past recipients who have gone on to achieve acclaim and prominence in their field are Denis Johnson, Mona Simpson, Tony Kushner, Jorie Graham, Gretel Ehrlich, Michael Cunningham, Alice McDermott, William T. Vollman, Ian Frazier, David Foster Wallace, Suzan-Lori Parks, Mark Doty, Jeffrey Eugenides, C.D.Wright, and Colson Whitehead.

This year's winners include several who have just published or will soon publish a first work. Although some were born in such far-flung places as Vietnam, South Korea, Puerto Rico, and The United Kingdom, they are now all living and working in this country, from California to Florida, to Nevada, to Alaska, and New York.

"This group of writers brings delightful surprises and pleasures," says Barbara Bristol, the Director of the Writers' Program. "Two transcendent non-fiction writers, one preoccupied with the fascinations of the insect world, and the other with the vibrant life of an ancient Beijing neighborhood; four fearless, dazzling writers of novels and short fiction; three fresh poetic voices; and a provocative, risk-taking playwright. We warmly welcome them into our now distinguished 25-year roster of Whiting Award recipients and look forward to these writers enriching American letters for many years to come."

The 2009 recipients were announced at a ceremony at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York on Wednesday, October 28. Dr. Robert L. Belknap, President of the Foundation, and trustee Kate Douglas Torrey presented the ten writers with their awards. The keynote speaker of the evening was the brilliant, visionary writer Margaret Atwood, whose new novel, The Year of the Flood, was just published to wide critical acclaim. Ms. Atwood is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, children's books and critical essays. Her novels include The Handmaid's Tale; Cat's Eye, shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; and Oryx and Crake, shortlisted for the 2003 Booker
Prize. Long considered one of Canada's pre-eminent writers, she lives in Toronto. 

Whiting Writers' Awards candidates are proposed by about a hundred anonymous nominators from across the country whose experience and vocations give them knowledge about individuals of extraordinary talent. Winners are chosen by a small anonymous selection committee of recognized writers, literary scholars, and editors, appointed annually by the Foundation. At four meetings over the course of the year, the selectors discuss the candidates' work and gradually winnow the list. They then recommend up to ten writers for awards to the Foundation's Trustees. The Foundation
accepts nominations only from the designated nominators. The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation was established in 1963 by Flora E. Whiting. In 1972, her unrestricted bequest of over $10 million enabled the Foundation to establish the Whiting Fellowships in the Humanities for doctoral candidates in their dissertation year. In the years since, the Foundation has annually awarded grants to Bryn Mawr, University of Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale to fund these Fellowships, the recipients of which are selected by each institution. The Foundation created the Whiting Writers' Awards in 1985 under the direction of Gerald Freund, who organized
and led the program until his death in 1997. To learn more about the Whiting Foundation and the selection process for the Whiting Writers' Awards visit www.whitingfoundation.org.

Photo Credit: Jessica Johnston