Elizabeth Spencer to be on N.C. Bookwatch this Sunday

From Landscapes of the Heart: A Documentary about Spencer 

If you're interested in casual elegance, and a 93-year-old woman who's as with-it as most 50-year-olds, then to turn on North Carolina Bookwatch at noon on UNC-TV this Sunday for host D.G. Martin's interview with prize-winning novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Spencer of Chapel Hill.
Her latest collection, "Starting Over," won the Rea Award for the Short Story last spring. The prize carries a $30,000 cash award, and Spencer told me she used some of the money to upgrade her garden.
Spencer is a native of Carrollton, Miss., and when she was a student at Belhaven College in Jackson, Miss., she met Eudora Welty, who lived across the street from the school. Welty joined with Spencer and a few other students to form a small writing group. Spencer and Welty became lifelong friends.
Spencer is also the author of the novella, "Light in the Piazza," later made into the 1960 film of the same name starring Olivia de Haviland.
Of "Starting Over," Malcolm Jones reviewing it in January in the New York Times, said, "Elizabeth Spencer seems to have spent her life watching, observing, always paying close attention, and for her it’s the whole truth or nothing. As far as I can tell, she never missed a thing. Judging from the stories in her latest collection, she’s not about to start now."

Chapel Hill's Elizabeth Spencer Wins $30,000 Rea Award

The late great Eudora Welty referred to Elizabeth Spencer's short stories as having a "certain prankish gaiety" about them. Now Spencer, that long-legged, Mississippi-born beauty who lives in Chapel Hill and is 92, has won the coveted $30,000 Rea Award for the Short Story.

Elizabeth Spencer

Cynthia Ozick, the first winner of the Rea Award in 1986, calls the prize, "Our little Nobel."
Jurors for the award are Mississippi-born Richard Ford ("The Sportswriter," "Independence Day"), Alabama-born Tom Franklin ("Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter") and Hillsborough's Lee Smith ("Fair and Tender Ladies," "Guests on Earth").
In their citation, the jurors said Spencer's stories "...revel in their delicious verbal (and moral) distinctions, take liberties and never fail to pay off."
"It is not at all that Ms. Spencer has lasted as a writer," they wrote, "but rather that she has thrived at the height of her powers to a degree that is unparalleled in modern letters."
Spencer is the author of eight short story collections and nine novels. "Starting Over" is her most recent collection. She is also the author of the 1960 novel, "The Light in the Piazza," made into a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer  movie in 1962 starring Olivia de Havilland, Yvette Mimieux and George Hamilton.
Previous winners of the Rea Award include John Updike, James Salter, Joyce Carol Oates, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, as well as Ford and Welty.

Here is Spencer being interviewed in January on D.G. Martin's "Book Watch."

Here is the Paris Review interview with Spencer from 1989.