Arts News: Francis Ya-Chu Cowhig wins Keene, Yale prizes for Lidless

From UT news service:

7/23/2009
Recent Graduate Awarded $50,000 Literary Prize
Frances Ya–Chu Cowhig, Winner 2009 Keene Prize for Literature

Frances Ya–Chu Cowhig, a graduate of the James A. Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas at Austin, has won the 2009 Keene Prize for Literature for her play titled "Lidless," a poetic treatment of the issue of torture at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Keene Prize is one of the world's largest student literary prizes. Cowhig will receive $50,000 and an additional $50,000 will be divided among three finalists. Cowhig's play was chosen out of 58 submissions in drama, poetry and fiction.

In the play, a former Guantanamo detainee dying of liver disease journeys to the home of his female interrogator to demand reparation for the damage she wreaked on his body and soul. It recreates the traumatic experience of interrogation and moves toward reconciliation between its protagonists.

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In addition to the Keene Prize "Lidless" has been selected by playwright Sir David Hare as the winner of the 2009 Yale Emerging Playwrights Prize.

The play was produced at the university's Department of Theatre and Dance Lab Theatre as part of the annual production, UT New Theatre (UTNT), last spring and will be given staged readings at Houston's Alley Theatre, Ojai Playwrights Conference and Yale Repertory Theatre. It will be published by Yale University Press.

[See continuation for rest of UT press release]

From website of D.C. Horn Foundation

“Lidless” centers on the reunion of a male Guantánamo Bay detainee and his former female Army interrogator. Fifteen years after his release, the prisoner revisits his captor and demands half her liver as recompense for the physical and psychological wounds inflicted during their interrogations.

Despite the political backdrop, the playwright contends the play centers on emotions. “It’s really a play about the senses — how visual and sensory experiences inform the moral and political issues,” Cowhig said. “There’s messy biological stuff. In a sense, I’m taking a political thing and putting a mirror of magical realism over it. No one wants to see a play that should be an op-ed piece.”

Ms. Cowhig is a graduate of The International School of Beijing, Brown University, where she studied play writing with Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel, and has spent the last three years in Austin Texas as a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers doing a multi-genre MFA program.


Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .