$50,000 literary award for Goldsmiths graduate

Goldsmiths, University of London graduate Aria Aber has received a $50,000 (£43,400) Whiting Award - the largest cash bursary in the United States for emerging writers.

Previous Whiting Award winners include some of the biggest names in fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama today. Vanity Fair has described it as a “crystal ball” in predicting who would go on to great success.

Aria Aber was born in Germany in 1991, the child of refugees from Afghanistan. She grew up in Münster, Germany, before moving to London in 2011. Aria graduated with a BA in English Literature from Goldsmiths in 2015. 

Remembering her time at Goldsmiths, she said: "I think fondly of my time there. I, like so many others, always wanted to be a writer, but I decided in Gail McDonald's poetry class that I definitely wanted to go into poetry. It was an eye-opening experience for me, and I often remember sitting in the twenty-four hour library until late at night and reading Yusef Komunyakaa or Louise Glück instead of doing my coursework."

Aria is one of four poets to receive a Whiting Award this year. Her debut collection Hard Damage is described by prize judges as “a riotous meeting place where Rilke, pedicures, lamb kebabs, Proust, and the goddess Artemis cross paths”, with poems that “evoke worlds lost and found with glowing intensity”.

Hard Damage was published by University of Nebraska Press in 2019 and won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, the Yale Review, New Republic and elsewhere. She was the 2018-2019 Ron Wallace Fellow and the University of Wisconsin-Madison and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU.

Upon awarding this year’s Whiting Awards, Director of Literary Programs Courtney Hodell, said: “We wish to celebrate extraordinary writers, but we find ourselves in extraordinary times, ones where we are all reinventing how to gather, exchange ideas, and deepen our connections with each other across a necessary distance.”

“As long as literature has existed, it has served this purpose, and we look to writers for their uncanny ability to sift raw experience for its poetry and truth. What we are living now, Whiting writers will reflect back to us in time, with depth and clarity and heart.”

Each year the Whiting Foundation gives $50,000 each to ten diverse emerging writers, allowing most their first chance to devote themselves full-time to their own writing, or to take bold new risks in their work. This year’s winners were announced on Wednesday 25 March, with the traditional ceremony postponed.