Southern lit's grande dame Elizabeth Spencer wins Mississippi fiction award for ‘Starting Over’

Chapel Hill’s own Elizabeth Spencer has won the Fiction Prize awarded by the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters for her collection of short stories, Starting Over. She will be honored at a banquet in Hattiesburg on June 6.

At ninety-two, Ms. Spencer is truly the grande dame of Southern writers with work spanning seven decades. Fire in the Morning, her first novel, was published in 1948. The majority of the stories in her new collection were written in the last three years.

Ann Beattie, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle about Starting Over, said:

Spencer [is] an elegant and subtle writer… Like Chekhov, the moments of most acute misery – those achingly