Novelist Megha Majumdar among winners of Whiting Award

NEW YORK (AP) — Megha Majumdar, whose novel “A Burning” was among the most talked about debuts of recent years, is among 10 recipients of a Whiting Award for emerging authors. Fiction writers Claire Boyles and Nana Nkweti, poets Ina Cariño and Anthony Cody and nonfiction writers Anaïs Duplan and Alexis Pauline Gumbs also will receive $50,000 each in prize money.

Others honored Wednesday at a Manhattan ceremony include fiction writer Rita Bullwinkel, poet Claire Schwartz and nonfiction writer Jesse McCarthy.

“As the world opens up, these brilliant writers open up our world,” said Courtney Hodell, director of Literary Programs for the Whiting Foundation. “From fresh cultural criticism, to poems of place and personhood and appetite, to fiction that brings surreal wit to compassionate portraits, their work is the spring thaw of the mind.”

The awards were established in 1985 and have previously gone to future literary stars such as Jonathan Franzen, Colson Whitehead and Tracy K. Smith.