I’m thrilled to learn that Kantika has received the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction from the wonderful Massachusetts Center for the Book, with a ceremony at the State House on October 8th.  I feel so lucky to live in a state with such a rich literary history and current scene and to be, with this award, in the company of dozens of writers I admire, both on this year’s list and from years past. I was born in California but was whisked away to Massachusetts when I was a newborn (my parents were waiting for me to be born before they could move east for my father’s job as an English professor at Williams College, in Williamstown, MA, a jewel of a town nestled in the northwest corner of the state). While I left Massachusetts for college, grad school and a few wonderful years in Paris, and while I love to travel far and wide, New England always calls me home. This place—its mountains, woods and fields, shorelines, towns and cities, its seasons, its people—is my homeplace.

Kantika tells the story of a radical diaspora, but when I plant my seeds and pick the peaches from my tree and welcome home my grown children to the antique yellow farmhouse where I live, I often think of my grandmother Rebecca, who inspired my novel. Her life circumstances forced her to leave Istanbul, the place where she was born and that she loved most of all, but she knew how to make a home anywhere, and she passed that on her love of the ground beneath her feet to her family.  My sister, mother and I all garden in Massachusetts, sharing cuttings, clippings, bulbs and roots.  The fact I’ve been able to make an enduring home here is, in a world so full of rupture and forced leavings, a piece of extraordinary good fortune. I wish my grandmother were alive to clap and sing out in her inimitable way upon learning of this beautiful award.