Sometimes It Pays To Be A Writer

Ten writers have each received $35,000 as winners of the 16th annual Whiting Writers' Awards for "exceptional talent and promise."

Among works by this year's recipients are Catfish and Mandala, a memoir by Andrew X. Pham about searching for his family in Vietnam; poems by Claude Wilkinson; and Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist, a New York-based novel about elevator inspectors.

"Each of these writers seems at an important turning point," awards director Barbara Bristol said Thursday.

Other winners this year are fiction writers John McManus, Lily King, Samantha Gillison and Robert Cohen, poets Albert Mobilio and James Thomas Stevens, and playwright Kelly Stuart.

Previous winners include such now-established authors as Mary Karr, Michael Cunningham, Tony Kushner and David Foster Wallace.