5 Famous Authors Who Were Awarded MacArthur “Genius” Grants

The MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, colloquially known as “genius grants,” is today “a $800,000, no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential.” Pretty much anyone can receive a grant—as the foundation puts it, “Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or individuals in other fields”—but they must be nominated by someone else. Severance author Ling Ma is a 2024 MacArthur Fellow; here are some other famous authors who were awarded the grants.

1. Octavia Butler
2. Colson Whitehead
3. Thomas Pynchon
4. Edwidge Danticat
5. Viet Thanh Nguyen

Octavia Butler

In 1995, Octavia Butler—who had published The Parable of the Sower two years earlier—became the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. Butler was famously inspired to write when the movie Devil Girl from Mars (1954) made her realize she could write a better story and get paid for it. She pursued her dream while working odd jobs (including as a potato chip inspector) until the advance she received for 1979’s Kindred finally allowed her to write full-time. When she got the call that she’d received a MacArthur grant, she didn’t believe it: “I didn’t know whether the call was on the level,” the author said later. “She was a very nice sounding woman, but when you don’t enter contests and somebody calls you and says you’ve won a lot of money, you sort of go, Hmmmmm. I mean, I’ve gotten calls like that. You know—they say you’ve won, and all you have to do is give them your social security number and your credit card number, and—mmm hmmmm.”  

Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead was 29 years old when he published his first novel, The Intuitionist, in 1999. It received critical acclaim, and his experimental approach to telling stories about Black American experiences would continue to earn him recognition in the years that followed. He received his MacArthur genius grant in 2002 at age 32. Fourteen years later, he published his most well-known work, The Underground Railroad, which presents an alternate history of slavery in the South. The novel won him the 2016 National Book Award for fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon’s first three novels—V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow— branded him as an exciting new voice in the postmodernist literary scene. Gravity’s Rainbow made an especially big splash, winning him the National Book Award in 1974, which he shared with Isaac Bashevis Singer for A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories that year. Seventeen years passed between the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow and the release of his next novel, Vineland, in 1990. During that period, he was inducted into the MacArthur Fellows class of 1988 when he was 51 years old.

Edwidge Danticat

Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti in 1969; she was raised by family members while her parents moved to the United States to pursue economic opportunities, and she joined them there in 1981. Fitting in wasn’t easy, and she turned to writing stories as a means of escape. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was published in 1994, when she was 25. “I started Breath, Eyes, Memory when I was still in high school after writing an article for a New York City teen newspaper about my leaving Haiti and coming to the United States as a child,” she said later. “After the article was done I felt there was more to the story, so I decided to write a short story about a young girl who leaves Haiti to come to the United States to be reunited with her mother, who she doesn’t really know. The story just grew and grew.” The Farming of the Bones, about the Parsley massacre in the Dominican Republic in the 1930s, came out four years later and won the American Book Award. Danticat was nominated for the National Book Award twice before receiving the MacArthur Grant in 2009 for her “moving and insightful depictions of Haiti’s complex history are enriching our understanding of the Haitian immigrant experience.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Literary scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. His remarkable debut novel, The Sympathizer, told from a conflicted double agent’s perspective, won multiple awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016. His 2017 short story collection, The Refugees, explores the aftermath of the Vietnam War, including a story that mirrored his own experience. He got his MacArthur Grant that same year. Nguyen was in Paris when he got the call; he let it go to voicemail, then texted “who is this?” The reply: “It’s the MacArthur Foundation.” As Nguyen told Longreads, he thought, “Oh … I should call these people back right away.”

“I’ve been following the MacArthur announcements for many years. So many writers I’ve admired and who I’d thought were doing powerful and necessary work had received these grants,” he said. “I also feel that some worthy writers have not been lucky enough to get this award. And that’s a key word, I think. We work hard, but luck plays such a huge role in getting these types of things. I always, of course, think back historically to the many writers whose labors created a tradition that made it possible for me to write. They were writing long before any of these kinds of recognitions existed. So that puts everything into context.”

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