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CHICAGO, Sept. 17 (UPI) -- The recipients of the 2014 MacArthur "Genius Grants" were announced by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Wednesday from its base in Chicago. Twenty-one fellows, twelve men and nine women, working in diverse fields, will be awarded $625,000 over five years with no expectations or strings attached to the grant.
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A MacArthur fellowship is perhaps one of the most prestigious and mysterious prizes for thinkers of any stripe. Awarded to artists, scholars, scientists, activists, advocates and any one else who catches the foundation's eye, the grants are based on achievement and potential and the selection process is entirely anonymous -- recipients cannot apply and in fact don't even know they've been nominated until they're notified that they've won.
The fellows, who were notified over the last two weeks, were then instructed to keep their windfall a secret, to tell no more than one person, until the awards were made public.
Among this year's winners is Alison Bechdel, the 54-year-old cult-status cartoonist and feminist icon behind the graphic novels "Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic" and "Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama."
According to the LA Times, when the people from the foundation tracked her down at an artist's residency in Italy, she didn't answer the phone the first time it rang.
"It was crazy," she says of the second call, which she did answer. "It was a little garbled, then I heard the person on the other end say the words MacArthur Foundation and the world started spinning."
"It will give me a lot of security that I don't have. Pay off some debts, save for retirement -- really boring stuff," Bechdel says of how she'll spend the award money. "I've been a cartoonist all my life!"
Bechdel, only the second cartoonist ever chosen for the award, also says the money will allow her to "take some risks, do something new -- to really plunge into my work. It's an incredible gift."
When Danielle S. Bassett, a 32-year-old physicist at the University of Pennsylvania and the youngest recipient of this year's awards received the call informing her of her grant, she was stunned into silence.
"Halfway through, I said, 'Are you absolutely sure you got the right person?' " Ms. Bassett told the New York Times in a telephone interview. "Then they read my bio to me."
"It's an unexpected honor and sort of validation," said Bassett, who studies the human brain.
Other winners of this years "Genius Grant" include two mathematicians, a labor organizer and workers' rights advocate, a computer scientist researching cryptography, a Jazz composer and saxophonist, a Stanford University psychologist studying racial bias, a translator, two historians, a public artist, a documentary filmmaker, lawyers, scientists, a poet, and a playwright.
A full list of the 2014 MacArthur Fellows can be found here.
