De’Shawn Charles Winslow and Margaret Atwood were the big winners at Center for Fiction’s Benefit and Awards Dinner in New York on Tuesday, the Associated Press reports.
Winslow took home the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize for In West Mills, his book about the unlikely friendship between an outspoken woman and a kindhearted man in a North Carolina town. The novel was one of Kirkus’ best fiction books of 2019.
Winslow beat out six other authors, including Ocean Vuong (On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous) and Julia Phillips (Disappearing Earth) for the award, which comes with a $10,000 cash prize. Previous winners of the award have included Marisha Pessl for Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Viet Thanh Nguyen for The Sympathizer, and Karl Marlantes for Matterhorn.
Atwood, along with Hulu executive Craig Erwich and producer Bruce Miller, accepted the Center for Fiction’s first-ever On Screen Award for the television adaptation of Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale. The prize is given to “original series that mirror the complexity and vision of great novels.”
Also honored at the ceremony was literary agent Lynn Nesbit, who received the group’s Maxwell E. Perkins Award, which honors “the work of an editor, publisher, or agent who over the course of his or her career has discovered, nurtured and championed writers of fiction in the United States.”
Nesbit, the co-founder of literary agency Janklow Nesbit, has represented authors such as Michael Crichton, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Gore Vidal, and Jimmy Carter.
Michael Schaub is an Austin, Texas–based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
