NEW YORK — Essayist and New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino and novelist Ling Ma are among this year's 10 winners of the Whiting Awards, which give $50,000 prizes for promising literary talent.
Tolentino's essay collection “Trick Mirror” was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle prize for best first book, while Ling Ma's debut novel “Severance” is a satirical science fiction novel about a devastating virus that has proved more believable than anyone desired.
Other winners announced Wednesday were fiction writers Andrea Lawlor and Genevieve Sly Crane, nonfiction writer Jaquira Diaz, poets Aria Aber, Diannely Antigua, Jake Skeets and Genya Turovskaya and playwright Will Arbery.
The Whiting awards were established in 1985. Previous winners include Colson Whitehead, Mary Karr and Tony Kushner.
The Associated Press