Valerie Waterhouse has been named the recipient of the inaugural Kitty Kelley Dissertation Fellowship for her research on Malachi Whitaker (1895–1976), a British working-class writer known for her short stories and memoir.

The $25,000 fellowship is awarded to a doctoral student in any department who is writing a dissertation in English that focuses on the life of another person or persons. It is endowed by Kitty Kelley, a founding member of BIO, the author of seven best-selling biographies, and a long-time advocate for biography and biographers.

“Being chosen by a committee of published biographers as the inaugural winner of the Kitty Kelley Dissertation Fellowship is a game-changer for me,” said Waterhouse. “Writing the first biography of any subject involves long, isolated hours in archives, libraries, on research trips, and in one’s own head.  This prestigious affirmation gives me the confidence and support I need to continue and complete my work. Malachi Whitaker was a literary author writing stories about northern working-class people at the time of Virginia Woolf’s upper-class Bloomsbury.  Her work fills a gap in English literary history. Thank you, Kitty Kelley, and BIO, for helping to bring attention to  her life and work.”

“The fellowship selection committee was pleased with the pool of applicants for its inaugural fellowship and was doubly pleased to find within that pool a true biography, one that makes the case for reconsidering an overlooked woman writer,” said Linda Leavell, chair of the committee. “Valerie Waterhouse’s writing sample shows that she has learned well the art of creating narrative out of serious scholarship. We congratulate Ms. Waterhouse on her promising project and also the University of Salford for accepting biography as a creative writing dissertation.”

The selection committee was composed of Linda Leavell, Heather Clark, and Carla Kaplan.