Mohsin Hamid

Authors Karen Russell and Donald Antrim are among announced Wednesday morning (though the news leaked on Tuesday evening). The $625,000 grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation are awarded annually, with no strings attached, to "talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction." The foundation that Antrim's "fiction and nonfiction are marked by a contrast between elegant, concise language and the disorienting chaos in which his characters find themselves. 

The How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia author adopted Murakami's philosophy of prioritizing physical fitness in order to maximize creativity—and reaped the benefits.

Here's how to get a writer's body in seven days. Spend hours hunched over a keyboard in low light, exercising nothing but your eyelids and your finger muscles. Subsist on coffee, cigarettes, and the occasional croissant. Drink no water; whiskey's better. Look up at your heroes on the wall: sickly, malnourished, funny-looking people who died of lupus and liver failure on the hot trail of the truth.