The 2006 Guggenheim Fellowships were recently awarded to twenty-seven poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers. The annual fellowships—sponsored by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, founded in 1925 by former U.S. Senator Simon Guggenheim and his wife Olga Hirsch Guggenheim in memory of their son—average $40,107 each, and are awarded for “distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.”
The poetry fellows are Catherine Barnett, Scott Cairns, Martín Espada, Daisy Fried, Judith Hall, Mark Halliday, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Cole Swensen, Anne Winters, and John Yau; the fiction fellows are Emily Barton, Jill Ciment, Helen DeWitt, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Allan Gurganus, John L’Heureux, Suki Kim, Gina Ochsner, Peter Orner, George Saunders, Steve Stern, Darin Strauss, Lynne Tillman, and Jennifer Vanderbes; and the creative nonfiction fellows are Judy Blunt, Joseph Mazur, and Richard McCann.
Past fellowship recipients include poets Toi Derricotte, Marie Ponsot, Kay Ryan, and Kevin Young, and fiction writers Donald Antrim, Aleksandar Hemon, Jhumpa Lahiri, and ZZ Packer.
