Dominican novelist Julia Alvarez, author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies, has just won the fourteenth annual F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Award, which honors the achievements of “a great American author.” The prize is sponsored by the F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference, an annual day-long event held at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland. She will receive the award on October 17. Previous recipients of the award are William Styron, John Barth, Joyce Carol Oates, E. L. Doctorow, Norman Mailer, Ernest J. Gaines, John Updike, Edward Albee, Grace Paley, Pat Conroy, Jane Smiley, William Kennedy, and Elmore Leonard. The conference celebrates the work of Fitzgerald, who is buried in the town at Saint Mary’s Church.
