It was announced on Monday that Jamaica Plain’s Jayne Anne Phillips won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction her sixth novel Night Watch.
The Washington Post reported that Phillips said it was “unbelievable” learning she had won the Pulitzer. She was actually stepping out of her JP home to tend to flowers on her balcony.
“I happened to check my email and there was an email from my editor’s assistant. I thought he was joking, but then I started seeing other messages,” reported WaPo.
WaPo reported that Phillips spent eight years working on Night Watch and considers it to form a trilogy of sorts with two her previous novels: Machine Dreams and Lark and Termite.
Night Watch “continues to reflect her interest in how war scars both civilians and combatants. This one takes place in her home state of West Virginia, where 12-year-old ConaLee and her mother, Eliza, struggle to survive the brutal, chaotic aftermath of the Civil War,” said WaPo.
Machine Dreams is about an American family’s experience during the Vietnam War, and Lark and Termite, is about a family in West Virginia whose father is fighting in the Korean War.
“The period during the Civil War, especially the experience of unsung, ordinary people, is something we should all be thinking about because we are such a divided country,” Phillips said to WaPo. “It’s an inescapable fact that there are parallels.”
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