Lauren Smith wins prestigious Annie Dillard Award for essay
Released: June 25, 2008
Strife. War. Disease. These are just some of the issues Lauren Smith, chair of the Women Studies department in the College of Letters and Sciences, tackles in her essay "Widows' Tale," winner of the prestigious Annie Dillard Award for Creative Non-Fiction from "The Bellingham Review." The heart-wrenching essay focused on the lives of two widows struggling to survive in West Africa, a region devastated by the AIDS virus and constant civil war.
Five years ago, Smith began a project in which she interviewed West African families who had lost someone to AIDS. She came across two widows who were two of the most impoverished people she had ever met. While the essay was extremely hard to write, Smith kept with the project thanks to support from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, the Fulbright Foundation and the Wisconsin Arts Board.
"This was a tremendously difficult essay to write," Smith said. "The point of the project was to look at other people—to provide more complex portraits of West Africans." The two widows in "Widows' Tale" were hard for Smith to interview and write about and it took her more than six months of concentrated effort to complete the process. "The two widows were so painful that they were hard to witness, they were hard to focus on. The whole process was terribly painful," she said. "I read Holocaust narratives and stories about Rwanda because I think what the women are going through in this story is on that level."
Along with focusing on the two widows, Smith had hoped to bring attention to Africa, a continent largely overlooked and ignored by western culture. This tied in with the essay being a reflection on the failure of Western culture to see what's going on in Africa and the intense desire to turn away from suffering.
Annie Dillard, the person for whom the award is named, is renowned for her nature writing. She has been compared to Thoreau and other transcendentalist writers and is considered unique because she doesn’t fall into one specific genre. In 1975, she was the Pulitzer Prize winner for general non-fiction. Her award is extremely competitive and anyone is allowed to enter.
First-place winners of the Annie Dillard award win $1,000 dollars and will have their work published in "The Bellingham Review."
Winning the award has been validation for Smith. "The stories I write are frequently dismissed as travel writing or journalism, but I think that's a way for people to distance themselves from Africa," Smith said. "Winning the award has helped to validate my struggle as a writer, especially because the readers at 'The Bellingham Review' really understood what I was trying to say about my struggles as a witness."
- Tom Applegarth,applegartg17@uww.edu
