Author, journalist, and war correspondent Anna Badkhen has been awarded the second Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship. Badkhen will spend several weeks in residence in Hawaii, where she will also participate in outreach events and present a public talk on the social responsibility of contemporary writers.
Sponsored by the Manoa Foundation of Honolulu, the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship was established in 2015 by Frank Stewart and Debra Gwartney to honor the seventieth birthday of acclaimed writer and naturalist Barry Lopez, who is the author of fourteen books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the short story collection Outside (Trinity University Press, 2014). The fellowship is given to a writer whose work, like Lopez’s, “contributes to an awareness of the civic and ethical obligation of artists; that helps us understand, through storytelling, that the survival of a human world depends upon a commitment to integrity, empathy, and compassionate reconciliation; and inspires us to take social responsibility for the perils, which we have created ourselves, to the human and non-human world.”
The fellowship provides several weeks of solitude and support in a quiet environment where writers can work on a project of their choosing. There is no application process. Fellows are nominated and chosen by a committee of editors and writers. In addition to Barry Lopez, this year’s selection committee included poet Jane Hirshfield, writer Pico Iyer, and Frank Stewart, editor of Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing. The fellowship and the public presentation are sponsored in part by the Manoa Foundation of Honolulu. Additional support is provided by the Halekulani Hotel, Waikiki.
Born in the Soviet Union, Anna Badkhen moved to the United States in 2004. She is the author of six books of nonfiction, including most recently Fisherman’s Blues: A West African Community at Sea (Riverhead, 2018) and Walking With Abel: Journeys With the Nomads of the African Savannah (Riverhead, 2016). She has also written about wars in Asia, Africa, and Europe for Foreign Policy, the New Republic, the New York Times, the Common, the Boston Globe, and other newspapers and journals.
The winner of the first Barry Lopez Fellowship was novelist Ann Pancake.