Fiction writer Julie Orringer is the second recipient of the Anne and Robert Cowan Writers’ Award of the Jewish Community Endowment Fund of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties. This annual unsolicited award honors extraordinary published Bay Area Jewish writers and comes with a cash award.

The Anne and Robert Cowan Writers’ Fund was established to recognize and award writers on an annual basis who have made an exceptional impact in the Bay Area through their uniquely Jewish perspective. Awardees must be published Jewish writers who reside in the Bay Area, are considered exceptionally gifted by their peers and readers, write with a high degree of creativity and intelligence, include positive Jewish themes in their subject matter and refer to Israel in a supportive and constructive manner.

The annual nomination and selection process for the award is determined by a committee of professionals, academics and published writers, which also chooses a magazine, literary supplement and journal or both for publication and promotion of the recipient’s writing. There are no stipulations as to how the $5,000 grant may be used.

Julie Orringer is currently the Helen Hertzog Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.  Her short story collection, How to Breathe Underwater, was a New York Times Notable Book and the winner of the Northern California Book Award. Orringer is a graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and was a Truman Capote Fellow in the Stegner Program at Stanford.  Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Best New American Voices, and The Best American Non-Required Reading.  She was the recipient of a 2004-5 National Endowment for the Arts grant for her current project, a novel set in Budapest and Paris in the late 1930s which follows a young Hungarian Jewish man through his study of architecture in Paris, and then back to Hungary when the war begins — when he’s conscripted into a labor battalion of the Hungarian army.

Orringer received her award on Wednesday, November 15 at 7 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco (JCCSF) as part of the Eighth Annual Koret International Jewish Book Awards Ceremony.  This event was sponsored by Jewish Family & Life!, in partnership with the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, with a grant from Koret Foundation Funds.  Julie remarked, “The Cowan Award represents for me a gift of valuable time — months that can be spent writing every day. It’s time I’ll be able to spend with the characters and with the narrative, time that will, I hope, help me make the right decisions about compactness and expansiveness.”

At the end of fiscal year 2005, the Federation’s Endowment Fund, with assets exceeding $2 billion, provided more than $215 million for a variety of grants, seed projects and emergency needs in the Jewish and general communities.

• “A storied career for Koret book prizewinner,” J, The Jewish News Weekly of Northern California, November 3, 2006

For more information call Judy Bloom, 415.512.6263