Georgia Shreve, ’69, won this year’s fiction contest with
“The Countess of M—,“ a story inspired
by the 19th-century fiction of German author Heinrich
von Kleist.
Novelists and former Stegner fellows Ron Hansen and
Bo Caldwell, ’77, who are married to each other,
chose this winner and two honorable-mention stories
from among 14 anonymous finalists. The finalists were
selected by Stanford editors from among 72 entries.
Shreve, interested in writing from an early age, saw
her first two plays performed in her basement before
she was a teenager. Her studies in creative writing
continued after Stanford in master’s programs
at Brown University and Columbia University. After earning
an MBA from Columbia, she worked in business for five
years. While raising her three sons, she studied music
composition and began publishing poetry and fiction.
Honorable-mention winners are “The
Natural History of Don Juan” by Netta Gillespie,
’52, about a woman who is serially susceptible
to a certain kind of male charm, and “My Auntie’s
Wedding” by Stephen L. Kanne, JD ’61, about
a romance between two unusual survivors.
Gillespie transferred to Stanford as a junior “primarily
to study creative writing and go to beach parties, neither
of which were available at Swarthmore.” During
her junior year, she spent “hours each week in
a state of awe mingled with a healthy dose of terror”
in a poetry seminar taught by Yvor Winters. She continued
to write while marriage, motherhood and graduate degrees
filled her life. She retired in 1991 from a job in instructional
technology at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign.
Before attending the School of Law, Kanne graduated
from Harvard and served in the Army. He practiced real
estate law for 33 years in Chicago and Los Angeles,
retiring in 1994. He and his wife, Claudia Adams, a
former writer for series television, live in Los Angeles
and Durango, Colo. His first novel, The Furax Connection,
has been submitted to publishers. “My Auntie’s
Wedding” was inspired by a trip to China and his
reading of Iris Chang’s history, The Rape
of Nanking.
Contest judge Hansen’s fiction
includes the novels The Assassination of Jesse James
by the Coward Robert Ford, Mariette in Ecstasy
and the forthcoming Exiles. This spring he
will be the Isaac and Madeline Stein Visiting Writer
at Stanford. Caldwell is the author of the novel The
Distant Land of My Father. In the kind of coincidence
that would feel at ease in a 19th-century story, Caldwell
in 1991 won an award given to a Stegner fellow to help
in the completion of a lengthy project. The prize was
established by Georgia Shreve. The two have never met. |
