UMass Lowell Student Julia Magee Wins 2025 Elinor Lipman Award for Writing

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The Pollard Memorial Library Foundation is delighted to announce that the winner of the fourth Elinor Lipman Award for Writing is Julia Magee, a student at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and a resident of Westford, MA. The Lipman Award will be presented on Thursday, October 30, at 6:30 p.m., in the Community Room of the Pollard Memorial Library.

 

This annual award honors Elinor Lipman, a distinguished, prolific, and much-loved author born and raised in Lowell, by awarding a prize of $1,000 for a work of fiction or creative non-fiction written by a Lowell resident or a student at Middlesex Community College or the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.  This year, 37 submissions were reviewed in a blinded manner by the judges:  Elinor Lipman; literary editor Pilar Garcia-Brown; and the 2022 Lipman Award winner, poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram.  For more information about the judges, please see:  https://lowelllibrary.org/get-involved/foundation/elinor-lipman-award/. 

 

The judges selected the story entitled “A Little Less than Halfway to Boiling” by Julia Magee. Ms. Lipman commented on the work, “Julia’s story was the unanimous choice of we three judges.  A particularly winning aspect was her creation of a first-person narrator who is quirky, increasingly loopy, yet a smart and entirely sympathetic character.” 

 

The Lipman Award recognizes the importance of literacy and learning in the City of Lowell for the lives of its residents.  The prize was established through a generous donation by Loom Press and is now funded by the Pollard Memorial Library Foundation.

 

For more information, please email LipmanAward@gmail.com.