Kate Christensen's novel The Great Man has won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction.
According to the Washington Post, The Great Man's "ironic title refers to a recently deceased painter" but the "focus is on the women in his life."
Maud Newton interviewed Kate last October:
"If by some stroke of bizarre and undeserved fortune my first novel had been hailed as genius and won prizes and I'd floated off in a filmy golden bubble of critical blowjobs and huge advances, that would not have been in any way as good for me as a writer as being written off as disposable fluff. Honestly."