Link is among this year’s 25 fellows, a group that includes artists, scientists, a community activist, a lawyer, an economist and more. (Full list here.) She’s the author of several story collections, including “Magic for Beginners,” “Pretty Monsters” and “Get in Trouble,” which was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. She joins such previous winners as Jesmyn Ward, Viet Thanh Nguyen, George Saunders and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

AD

AD

To the author known for spinning fantastical tales, the MacArthur announcement seemed downright surreal.

“Right now it feels like winning the golden ticket,” she said, with a nod to Roald Dahl’s classic, “except that no one is asking me to run a chocolate factory.”

Link and her husband, Gavin Grant, live in Massachusetts where they own Small Beer Press, a publisher of literary fiction, science fiction and fantasy. She acknowledged that $625,000 is considerably more than a typical year’s profit for their indie publishing house.

“If we made that much in profit, we would have to change our name to Slightly Larger Beer Press,” she said.

The MacArthur grant will be paid out in quarterly installments over five years.

AD

“I’m not quite sure yet what this means for Small Beer,” Link said. “But I did breathe an enormous sigh of relief when I thought about how I was going to pay bills next year. It allows me to keep writing the kinds of narrative that I most want to write. Same goes for publishing the kind of fiction that we’ve been fortunate enough to publish.”

Link is currently working on a novel. “It needs a little longer to boil,” she said.