Rachel Kadish, a faculty member in our Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, recently won the fiction award among the Julia Ward Howe prizes for outstanding Boston-area authors of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young Reader books. She and the other authors were honored at Boston Public Library on Sept. 26.
Kadish, whose widely acclaimed third novel, “The Weight of Ink,” won a National Jewish Book Award, interweaves the tale of two women — one, a scribe to a blind rabbi in the 17th century, and the other, an ailing historian in modern-day London, who has a love of Jewish history.
"The writing and research for ‘The Weight of Ink’ took many years, and the process often felt like a very long journey with no map — but I fell in love with these characters and this history, and that made the work worth it,” Kadish said. “It’s a surprise and a delight to learn that the novel has been recognized by an organization I so admire.”
While Kadish often gives readings from her own work, both locally and elsewhere, she also promotes the work of other writers whose voices she believes are essential to our public conversation. On Oct. 13 at Cambridge’s Porter Square Books, Kadish, a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, publicly interviewed author Julie Lindahl, the granddaughter of high-ranking Nazi SS officer. Lindahl’s memoir, “The Pendulum,” is about discovering that family secret, and the effect of that discovery on her on life’s path. The Oct. 13 event kicked off a series of public dialogues between the two authors.
The Boston Authors Club was founded in 1899 to further literary purposes and to promote social interaction among authors living in Boston and vicinity. The annual Julia Ward Howe Awards (named after the club's first president) honor the Boston-area authors of outstanding adult and young reader books published in the prior year.
The complete list of Julia Ward Howe prize winners and finalists (for books published in 2017) include:
- Fiction Winner: Rachel Kadish, “The Weight of Ink” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
- Fiction Finalists: Gregory Maguire, “Hiddensee” (HarperCollins) and Celeste Ng, “Little Fires Everywhere” (Penguin Press)
- Nonfiction Winner: Jonathon Losos, “Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution” (Penguin Random House)
- Nonfiction Finalist: Steven Hatch, “Inferno: A Doctor’s Ebola Story” (St. Martin’s Press)
- Poetry Winner: Frank Bidart, “Half Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016” (Farrar Straus Giroux)
- Poetry Finalist: Gregory Lestage, “Hope Is a Small Barn” (Antrim House)
- Young Reader Winner: Cynthia Levinson, “The Youngest Marcher” (Atheneum Books, Simon & Schuster)
- Young Reader Finalists: Mira Bartok, “The Wonderling” (Candlewick Press), Kimberly Fusco, “Chasing Augustus” (Knopf, Random House), and Lauren Wolk, “Beyond the Bright Sea” (Penguin Random House)
Other honors Kadish has earned include: a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fiction Fellowship; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; Bunting Institute/Radcliffe Institute Fellowship; Stanford University Writer in Residence/Koret Foundation Young Writer on Jewish Themes; MacDowell Colony's Robert Maxwell Award; Pushcart Prize winner; Whiting Foundation grantee; John Gardner Book Prize.