Elif Batuman, PhD '07, has received a $50,000 Whiting Writers' Award for promising young authors. She wrote The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. . . . Great House, by Nicole Krauss, '96, MA '96, was a fiction finalist for the National Book Award. . . . Former Gap executive Anne Gust Brown, '80, became First Lady of California when her husband, Jerry Brown, was sworn in as governor in January.
Photo: Paul Sakuma/AP