Mary Lee Settle

Settle grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, served in the WAAF and later the U.S. Army during the Second World War, and drew on both the war and her home state's mining and settler history across a body of fiction that took American regional history seriously as a subject.

Her five-novel Beulah Quintet, tracing West Virginia from its seventeenth-century settlement to the twentieth century, remains her central achievement, but Blood Tie (1977), set among American and European expatriates in a Turkish coastal town she knew from years spent living there, won the National Book Award in 1978.

Furious that the ceremony treated the prize as a celebrity photo opportunity rather than a literary judgment, she used her own prize money to help found the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, judged by writers rather than publishers. She died in Virginia in 2005.