4 Playwrights Among Winners of 2012 Whiting Awards

The winners of the 2012 Whiting Writers' Awards were announced on Tuesday. Each of the 10 chosen writers receives a cash award of $50,000. The honors, issued annually since 1985, are given “not for a specific work, but for the abundant promise of future work,” said Barbara Bristol, director of the Whiting writers' program.

The 2012 list includes four playwrights, the most to ever receive the awards in one year. They include Danai Gurira, the Iowa-born and Zimbabwe-raised author of “Eclipsed” and “The Convert,” and Samuel D. Hunter, whose play “The Whale” is now in previews at Playwrights Horizons. Mr. Hunter's other works include “A Bright New Boise” (he is from Idaho) and “The Few.” In The Times, David Rooney wrote: “A common thread in many of Mr. Hunter's plays is the quiet, or not so quiet, desperation running through many Middle American lives.”

The other two playwright winners are Mona Mansour, the author of “Urge for Going,† and Meg Miroshnik, whose work includes “The Tall Girls.”

Ms. Bristol said the record percentage of playwrights named this year was “an indication of how rich and vibrant the theater is today - and will certainly be tomorrow.”

The fiction writers are Anthony Marra, whose first book, the novel “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,” set in Chechnya, will be published in May; Hanna Pylväinen, whose novel “We Sinners” is about nine siblings from a strict Lutheran family; and Alan Heathcock, author of the story collection “Volt.” In The New York Times Book Review, Donald Ray Pollock wrote about “Volt”: “The stories could be set in another century, the characters like members of an ancient sect grappling with love and faith and forgiveness and retribution. Even Heathcock's prose, spare and muscular yet poetic, fits the foreboding, God-fearing nature of the stories.”

The poets Ciaran Berry (“The Sphere of Birds”) and Atsuro Riley (“Romey's Order”) and the non-fiction writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts round out this year's list. Ms. Rhodes-Pitts's book “Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America” was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Echoing the stated objective of the awards, Dwight Garner called the book “intoxicating, and lighted by the promise of better things to come.”

The awards are issued by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, which was established in 1963 by Flora E. Whiting. Past winners include Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Tony Kushner and Sarah Ruhl.