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Malahat Author Wins 2009 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

Anne Sanow has won one of The United States’ most prestigious awards for her book of short stories, Slow Stately Dance in Triple Time. Her short story, “Rub al-Khali,” which was published in our Winter 2006 issue (#157) is included in the collection. Like the others in Slow Stately Dance, it is set in modern-day Saudi Arabia and sensitively explores the tensions within a family whose younger generation has been exposed to a North American lifestyle.

"My characters are native Saudis and expatriates going about their lives and loves and losses and discovering who they are and where they belong," Sanow said. "My interest as a writer is to try to avoid easy exoticism by working from the inside out, character by character and place by place, so that somehow, the epic and minute become enmeshed."

Slow Stately Dance in Triple Time will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in fall 2009.