Jennifer Haigh's "Mercy Street" Selected as Winner

The Mark Twain House & Museum Announces Jennifer Haigh’s Mercy Street as 2023 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award Winner

Hartford - The Mark Twain House & Museum is thrilled to award the 2023 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award (MTAVL) to Jennifer Haigh for her novel, Mercy Street. Haigh, a resident of Boston, is the author of five previous novels, including Mrs. Kimble (2003), which won the PEN/Hemingway Award for outstanding debut fiction, as well as Baker Towers (2005) and Heat and Light (2016), both set in the fictional Western Pennsylvania town of Bakerton.

The Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award was established in 2016 and is generously sponsored by Michelle and David Baldacci and Bank of America. Honoring distinguished fiction that speaks with an American voice and tells a uniquely American story, the Award seeks to preserve the searching and challenging spirit of Mark Twain’s way of looking at the world. It is given to a work of fiction published in the previous calendar year and carries a $25,000 cash prize.

The Award Celebration, a dinner featuring Haigh and Baldacci in conversation, will take place on Friday, November 3, at the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, CT, and is open to the public. Baldacci states, "Congratulations to Jennifer Haigh for winning the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award for her novel Mercy Street. I look forward to presenting the award to Ms. Haigh and having a discussion about her exceptional novel.” Tickets and information are available at marktwainhouse.org/mtavlcelebration/.

Joseph Gianni, President of Bank of America Greater Hartford, states, "Once again, the judges selected a novel that reflects Twain's contribution to literature: a truly American voice telling a singularly American story. Bank of America is delighted to play a part in honoring Ms. Haigh for her powerful novel, Mercy Street."

Chosen from over 120 books submitted by a broad range of publishers, Mercy Street weaves together the stories of four characters connected in a web of events centering on the Mercy Street Clinic for Women’s Health, a Boston facility that provides abortion services. The novel’s characters include a social worker at the clinic, a pot dealer who briefly becomes her lover, a devout Catholic who protests at Mercy Street, and a white supremacist and misogynist on an ominous crusade to stop the abortions of white babies.

The five judges on the MTAVL panel praised Jennifer Haigh for her deft social realism, commending Mercy Street for its “vibrant” narrative voice, calling it “hard-hitting and also grounded in the ordinary” and “a mirror for how life actually works.” “Despite the seriousness of the central issue, the characters’ stories are told with subtle humor,” commented one judge, praising Mercy Street for its “rare blend of strong prose with a compelling and propulsive story.”

Above all, the judges applauded the novel for its exceptional sympathy and humanity. “Jennifer Haigh’s real interest lies in individuals and in the totality of their lives,” wrote one judge. “Her characters are all conveyed with terrific specificity and generosity. Even those whose political extremism ultimately might produce harm are given their full due as complicated humans. Mercy Street explores a burningly topical American issue with intelligence, sympathy and skill.”

“This is a book that really came out of personal experience,” Jennifer Haigh said in a conversation with Committee Chair and MTH Board Member Rand Cooper after being informed of the award. While in her forties Haigh volunteered at a Boston abortion clinic – answering a hotline in the same manner as Claudia, the novel’s main protagonist. “I did not start with the intention of writing about it,” the novelist said, noting the highly polarizing nature of abortion rights. “It seemed like a crazy thing to do, to alienate half my readers by writing about abortion rights. But after volunteering for some years, I realized it was the most interesting thing in my life, and the most compelling. Writing a novel about anything is really difficult, but if it's not about the thing you care the most about, you'll never finish it. It was a novel that compelled me to write it.”

But the sympathy that the judges singled out is more than a matter of background. “I really think that it’s the entire point of writing novels,” Haigh states, “The novel is the best technology we have to get inside somebody else's consciousness. About her success in rendering characters on all sides sympathetically, Haigh cites her childhood in what she calls “Pennsyltucky,” the hardscrabble region of Western Pennsylvania long dominated by the coal-mining industry. She used it as the childhood home of Victor Prine, the anti-abortionist in Mercy Street. “Victor Prine is a guy I probably would disagree with about the color of the sky. But in any character, you have to take their side, at least while you're writing them -- even if they believe things that you adamantly do not believe. In the time you're writing the character, you have to make common cause with them, and see the world through their eyes.”

The 2023 MATVL Finalist Panel of Judges includes novelist Amity Gaige, novelist and short story author Dan Pope, 2022 MTAVL recipient Dawnie Walton, Twain scholar Lawrence Howe, and novelist and journalist Rand Richards Cooper,

Previous winners of The Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award include The Final Revival of Opal and Nev by Dawnie Walton (2022); The Only Good Indian by Stephen Graham Jones (2021); On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (2020); Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (2019); Dodgers by Bill Beverly (2018); and The Harder They Come by T.C. Boyle (2017).