is honored to announce
the Winner of the
15th Marfield Prize
for outstanding writing
about the arts in 2020 to
Maggie Doherty
author of
“The Equivalents:
A Story of Art,
Female Friendship,
and Liberation in the 1960s”
Ms. Doherty will receive $10,000
as the Marfield award winner for 2020.
“The sun was already setting one evening late in the winter of 1957 when twenty-nine-year-old Anne Sexton, shaking with nerves and clutching a cardboard folder, walked down Commonwealth Avenue, the main thoroughfare in Boston’s Back Bay. She passed Victorian brownstones, statues of local luminaries, and large, stately trees. She soon arrived at her destination, a large stone building on the boulevard’s north side.
She passed through the building’s imposing gray facade and walked through the opulent ballroom hidden inside. This was one of her first trips out of her home in Newton in recent memory; to accomplish it, she had requested the company of a kind neighbor named Sandy Robart. Sexton had always been a nervous woman, but these days she was something more: anxious, fearful, choked by self-doubt. Public places of any kind produced intense discomfort; most days she didn’t leave her house. She had recently attempted suicide; she would make a second attempt in just a few months”
photo by Max Larkin
Maggie Doherty teaches first-year writing at Harvard, where she earned her PhD in English. Her writing has appeared in many publications, including The New Republic, The New York Times, n+1, and The Nation. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The 15th Marfield Prize Judges
The 15th Marfield Prize was judged by Ron Charles, book critic of The Washington Post; Alice McDermott, winner of the National Book Award and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for American Literature and Terence Winch, winner of the American Book Award, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing.
The Marfield Prize Committee would like to thank all volunteer readers, both Club members and community members, who generously gave their time and talent to read and rate the 57 books that were considered during the initial phase of the 2020 Marfield Prize.
The Marfield Prize or the National Award for Arts Writing is given annually by the Arts Club of Washington to the author of a nonfiction book about the visual, literary, media, or performing arts. Established to generate broader interest in the arts among general readers, the award celebrates prose that is clear, eloquent and inspiring, creating a strong connection with the arts and artists. Books are judged by a distinguished independent panel of judges. First given in 2006, the prize's endowment was established by a devoted and generous Arts Club member Jeannie S. Marfield.