Michael Zapata has won the inaugural DAG Prize for Literature.
Today, the DAG Foundation announced the winners of its inaugural DAG Prizes, which award $20,000 each to a visual artist, a writer, and a musician “whose work expands the possibilities for American art.”
According to the Foundation, the DAG Prize for Literature, which is given by musicians Alyssa and Douglas Graham, “aims to support writing that offers significant innovation—for example, at the level of form, content, or genre—and is meant to support the second book-length prose project of a writer whose work has not yet received prominent literary recognition.”
The inaugural winner is Michael Zapata, author of The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, which you can read an excerpt from here. Zapata was selected from a list of 5 finalists, winnowed down from 166 applicants. The prize will support his work in progress, a novel entitled The Census Taker, which “follows the lives of a Quechua entomologist and her son, a census taker in Chicago, who documents disappeared people following a coup.”
The other winners are Ziba Rajabi (DAG Prize for Visual Art), and Elizabeth Ziman (DAG Prize for Music).
“In today’s climate of pullback in support for the arts we couldn’t be more excited about the work proposed by Ziba, Michael, and Elizabeth, three artists whose work brings innovation to what we see as an increasingly homogeneous arts culture,” said prize founder Alyssa Graham, in a statement.
“These prizes are the first in what we hope will be a meaningful and unique contribution to the ever-challenging arts funding landscape,” Douglas Graham added. “Our longtime dream to help other artists sustain their careers and reach their goals has finally come to fruition.”
