Cornell alumni Lydia Peelle ’00 and Rattawut Lapcharoensap ’01 each won the 2010 Whiting Writers’ Award, a $50,000 grant  given to ten writers, playwrights and poets of talent and promise. 

The Whiting Foundation’s panel of judges said that they were especially impressed with Peelle’s “beautiful prose, gorgeous sentences [and] flawless ear,” according to the Whiting Foundation’s website.

But Peelle — who has worked as a teacher, received her M.F.A. from the University of Virginia and published a book, Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing — remained modest.

“I’m still finding it,” Peelle said about her voice as a writer. “The only way to do it is by spending a lot of time alone. Writing develops slowly, but when you hit it, you know you’ve got it.”

 The committee emphasized the beauty of Peelle’s narrative in relation to nature and the deteriorating state of the planet.

“[This] interest stems from my days at Cornell,” said Peelle, who spent her first two years at Cornell as an animal science major. Peelle added that she was always interested in biology and the natural world and saw writing as a way to explain and expand on those issues.

“These are very dark stories; her vision is severe,” the judges said of Peelle’s work on the foundation’s website.

For Lapcharoensap, the committee highlighted his “depth of emotion” and “fluent descriptive detail,” the website stated. His short stories, including the collection Sightseeing, reflect his childhood growing up in Bangkok, Thailand.

Lapcharoensap is currently living in Thailand researching for his first novel and will spend the spring and summer at the University of Leipzig.

Potential candidates for the Whiting Writers’ Award are recommended by about 100 people from across the country “whose experience and vocations give them knowledge about writers” who are early in their careers, according to the Whiting Foundation’s website. The winners are then chosen by an anonymous committee of well-known writers and editors, who the foundation appoints annually.

Past Cornellian winners include Manuel Muñoz, M.F.A. ’98.

Peelle said that students hoping to become writers should take advantage of the Cornell experience, and she emphasized the importance of exploring other fields in different majors and colleges.

“Definitely do; it is what I look back on with the greatest gratitude,” Peelle said. “Explore … do not limit yourself just to literature ... at Cornell you can study wine, sheep, molecular biology.”

Peelle and Lapcharoensap, who reunited at the award ceremony in October in New York City, had not seen each other in 11 years –– since the two were both in the same fiction writing class. At the time, the two read and edited each other’s stories for the class and shared an undergraduate writing prize.

“We weren’t notified [about winning the Whiting Award] in advance … it was pretty amazing,” Peelle said.