Irene Bennett Brown, author of historical and juvenile fiction, to receive Owen Wister Award from Western Writers of America
CAMP, Wyo., February 15, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Irene Bennett Brown, a Kansas native known for her historical and juvenile novels, will receive the 2022 Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Contribution to Western Literature, Western Writers of America (www.westernwriters.org) announced.
Brown, 90, will also be inducted into the Western Writers Hall of Fame, located outside the McCracken Research Library at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyo.
“I never imagined that I would be honored with the famous Owen Wister Award,” Brown said of her Jefferson, OR, home, where she lives with her husband, Bob, a retired research chemist. “I am stunned, delighted and deeply grateful.”
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“Irene Bennett Brown contribution to the western genre is significant,” said the WWA president Chris Ens noted.
Brown’s novel Before the lark won the WWA’s Spur Prize for Best Western Children’s Book in 1982, was selected by the Junior Literary Guild, and was nominated for the Mark Twain Prize. Two sequels for adults to this novel, by Miss Royal mules (2018) and Tangled times (2020), won the Will Rogers Medallion Awards. HillH
Author of over 20 books, Brown’s first novel, Towards the valley of the rainbowwas published in 1969. Other titles include willow whip (1979), afternoon morning glory (nineteen eighty one), The woman of the plain (1994) and where danger danced (2012). She enjoyed using her home country as a backdrop for her historical novels.
“Irene Bennett Brown and his life’s work in Western literature embody the very essence of what the Owen Wister Prize was created for,” said the WWA Vice President. Phil Mills Jr., chairman of the WWA’s Owen Wister Award Committee. “She has earned her place among the finest of those writers who have found their creative home in the American West.”
Since the early 1950s, WWA has honored and promoted all forms of literature about the American West. Previous Owen Wister winners include Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday; historians Eve Ball and Robert M. Utley; and successful novelists Rudolfo Anaya, Elmore Leonard, Tony Hillerman and Lucia St. Clair Robson.
The Wister Award is a bronze statue of a bison created especially for WWA by the artist Robert Dufie.
SOURCE Western Writers of America
