Winners Announced in Texas Institute of Letters’
Competitions
Stephen
Harrigan of Austin took top prize Saturday evening in the Texas Institute of
Letters’ literary competition for works published in 2011, claiming the $6,000
Jesse H. Jones Fiction award for his novel, Remember
Ben Clayton, published by Alfred A. Knopf.
The
award was presented at the 76th annual meeting of the organization
in San Antonio at the Menger Hotel.
Winner
of the non-fiction Carr P. Collins prize was Steven Fenberg of Houston for his
biography of Jesse H. Jones, the powerful Houston entrepreneur and
philanthropist. Entitled Unprecedented
Power: Jesse Jones, Capitalism, and the Common Good, it was published by
Texas A&M University Press. Fenberg
was presented with a check for $5,000.
Nationally
recognized magazine writer Gary Cartwright received the Lon Tinkle Award for a
distinguished career in letters associated with Texas. Cartwright, who has published novels and
nonfiction books and written produced screenplays, is perhaps best known for
his four-decade long association with Texas
Monthly.
More
than $22,000 in prize money was distributed to authors in the categories of
fiction, non-fiction, scholarly, short stories, poetry, journalism, magazine
articles, book design, translation, and children and young adult. The
competition is limited to authors who have lived in the state for at least two
years or have entries pertaining to Texas subjects.
Harrigan’s
winning novel about is about an enigmatic Texas rancher who hires an ambitious
sculptor from New York, recently moved to Texas, to create a memorial statue of
his son who was killed in World War I. Among Harrigan’s previous novels is the award-winning The Gates of the Alamo.
University
of Texas at Austin architecture professor Christopher Long won the scholarly
book competition for The Looshaus, a book
published by Yale University Press and which describes the impact of Alfred
Loos’ famous building in Vienna that provided a powerful influence in the
development of modern architecture. This award carried a prize of $2,500.
The Texas Institute of Letters was funded in
1936 to recognize literary achievement and to promote interest in Texas
literature. W.K. (Kip) Stratton of Round Rock assumed the presidency from
Darwin Payne of Dallas.
Other
winners were Siobhan Fallon, Steven Turner Award for best first published
fiction, You Know When the Men Are Gone;
Jennifer Grotz, Helen C. Smith Award for poetry, The Needle; Jose Antonio Rodriguez, Bob Bush Award for Best First
Book of Poetry, The Shallow End of Sleep;
Skip Hollandsworth, O. Henry Magazine award for Texas Monthly article, “The Lost Boys”; Jordan Smith, Stanley
Walker Newspaper Journalism award, “The Science of Injustice,” Austin Chronicle; Bret Anthony Johnston,
Kay Cattarulla Short Story Award, “Paradeability” in American Short Fiction; Barbara Werden and Lindsay Starr, Fred
Whitehead Award for Design of a Trade Book, Lone
Star Law (written by Michael Ariens and published by Texas Tech Press); Dave
Oliphant, the Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translation of a Book,
Nicanor Parra’s After-Dinner Declarations;
Elaine Scott, Children’s Book, Space,
Stars and the Beginning of Time; and
J.L. Powers, Young Adult Book, This Thing
Called the Future.
Sixteen
new members were inducted into the organization. They were Norma Cantú,
Sarah Cortez, Justin Cronin, Andrew Geyer, Alan Govenar, Manuel Luis Martínez, Jane
Clements Monday, Deborah Parédez, Ben Rehder, John Phillip Santos, Jim Schutze,
Lonn Taylor, Tim Tingle, Sergio Troncoso, Emilio Zamora, and Gwendolyn Zepeda.