Local Author Lifetime Achievement
(LOLA) Award

The San Diego Public Library LOLA (Local Authors Lifetime Achievement) Award. The LOLA Award is an annual award presented to a writer who has had a distinguished writing career and whose work has provided significant enrichment to the San Diego Community.

• 2008 - Susan Vreeland
• Past Recipients, 2007-1997

SUSAN VREELAND, three-time winner of the Theodore Geisel Award given by the San Diego Book Awards, is known for historical fiction on art-related themes. Girl in Hyacinth Blue (1999, New York Times Bestseller; Finalist for Book Sense Book of the Year) traces an alleged Vermeer painting through the centuries revealing its influence on those who possessed it. NY Times calls it "intelligent, searching and unusual...filled with luminous moments...never content with surfaces." Listed in California Department of Education Recommended Reading for Secondary Students, it has become part of the curriculum for many schools and universities throughout the country. The Hallmark Hall of Fame movie based on Girl, titled Brush With Fate and starring Glenn Close, Ellen Burstyn, and Thomas Gibson, was named the most ambitious project ever filmed in Hallmark's history of 252 productions. Girl has been translated into 25 languages.

The Passion of Artemisia, (2002, New York Times Bestseller; Book Sense Year's Favorite) illuminates the inner life of Artemisia Gentileschi, Italian Baroque painter, the first woman to make her living solely by her brush. People Magazine says, "Vreeland set a high standard with Girl in Hyacinth Blue. The Passion of Artemisia is even better." It has been translated into 18 languages, and earned Vreeland an invitation to the international Festivaletteratura in Mantua, Italy, where she addressed the audience in Italian which she studied for the occasion.

The Forest Lover (2004, Book Sense Book Club Pick) follows the rebel Canadian painter, Emily Carr, into the British Columbia wilderness to paint the native totemic carvings of the people she loved. Publishers Weekly says, "One of the pleasures of this beguiling novel based on Carr's life is the way Vreeland herself has acquired a painter's eye." Vreeland has written the introduction for Penguin Classic's new Canadian edition of Carr's work, Klee Wyck, about her interaction with First Nations people.

Vreeland's story collection, Life Studies, (2005, LA Times Bestseller) reveals Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters from points of view of people who knew them and shows that ordinary people can have profound encounters with art. According to The San Diego Union, "Few story collections contain more than two breathtaking stories, but Vreeland's Life Studies delivers a full, rich palette. Light and beauty pour from the pages in deft, accessible prose strokes." It includes a story that takes place in the San Diego Museum of Art.

Her most recent work, Luncheon of the Boating Party, is a novel of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the fourteen models for his masterpiece by the same name, and the vibrant Parisian culture of 1880, "done with a flourish worthy of Renoir himself," said USA Today. It has been on the Best-Seller Lists of The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, and was a Book Sense Pick.

Her first book, What Love Sees, (1988) a biographical novel about a blind couple living in Ramona, became a CBS television movie starring Richard Thomas and Annabeth Gish (1996), and was filmed in San Diego County. Vreeland's short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, New England Review, Dominion Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Connecticut Review, Confrontation and twenty other literary magazines and anthologies. She has written more than 250 articles for newspapers and magazines. Her fiction and non-fiction appears as the lead section in the Prentice Hall Literature textbook for tenth grade. In 2006, she wrote on To Kill a Mockingbird in The Book That Changed My Life: Discover the Must-Read Books That Transformed 71 Remarkable Authors, Gotham Books; and has contributed to Now Write! Fiction Writing Exercises From Today's Best Writers and Teachers, Tarcher/Penguin.

Ms. Vreeland is a product of San Diego, having attended Horace Mann Junior High, Crawford High, and San Diego State University (BA, English, minor Library Science; M.Ed.; MA in Literature) and has worked in the libraries of all three institutions. She carried out her 30-year career in education teaching literature at Madison High and University City High Schools in San Diego. She was on the faculty of the Spalding University Brief Residency Program in Creative Writing, and has been invited as a faculty member to the Abroad Writers' Conference in France, and is studying French for that purpose.

She has addressed many branches of Friends of the Library, as well as audiences at American Library Association, UCSD, SDSU, the Greater San Diego Council of Teachers of English, California Association of Teachers of English (CATE), and National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the San Diego Museum of Art three times, and twice at the Timken Gallery, and fifteen other art museums, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Ms Vreeland is a frequent library patron since her books are historical fiction and require much research.