The NEA reads the submissions blindly, this “granting agenc[y]” had no idea of the applicant’s past success.

While I was slogging away in academia (before my life as a full time freelance writer) I noticed that the people who already had a sucessful track record with grants were the ones who kept getting them. It was sort of a catch-22, in order to be a successful grant writer, you already had to have gotten grants. Sick really. Thankfully I had a decent record, but there were a lot of people who had to pile their debts high just to pay tuition. And then there were the Lahiri style hot shots who got everything they applied for and made everyone else want to strangle them.

If there was any justice in the world (not saying that there is) then granting agencies should put a little less emphasis on past sucesses and try to foster up and coming artists/scientists/whatever.

1. I highly doubt whether Lahiri really received a $4 million book deal.

2. I agree with you that Lahiri doesn’t strictly speaking need the money in the way that many other applicants do, but the way of the world (or at least of upper-middle-class New York) is that even professionals earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year will find an extra $20,000 comes in handy. Annoying but true.

3. Writers ‘need’ to receive prestigious grants for reasons other than money. One reason is the kind that Lahiri gestures to–if you’re the mother of young children and work at home as a writer or other kind of artist, it is indeed difficult to hold onto your professional identity, and this kind of professional validation (and yes, I know she’s had tons of validation, but validation is addictive and makes us want more of it!) might well be genuinely important to someone already very well-known. Another reason concerns, say, teaching jobs: if you wanted to be a tenured professor at NYU or Columbia, you had better have a lot of stuff like this on your CV. (Again, I don’t say that this is a good thing, just that it’s the world we live in.) And when you think about it, and especially when you think about how the figures reported for advances are usually quite inflated, that’s actually a much more financially secure existence than even a million-dollar advance.

4. The website blurb definitely sounds annoying, but she was probably required to write a formal acceptance of the grant in which she explained how she planned to use the money. This is a standard requirement in such cases. And that rather smug and grateful tone is the one that for better and for worse we tend to adopt in such circumstances.

All I’m saying is don’t rush to judgment!