Grants to Support a Woman Writer

Would-be writers are always looking for grants to not merely augment their income, but replace it entirely.  "How am I supposed to write, if I have to go to work?" they ask.  Good question.  However, the few grants available to support writers are not at all no-strings attached.  They have plenty of strings, with an eye towards funding a piece of literary art at the end of the grant period.  They aren't funding your fantasy, they are contracting you for work.

A good example are grants through the foundation A Room of Her Own Foundation, named for the famous essay by Virginia Woolf which argues that women need a room of one's own to flourish as artists.  With an eye to creating such a financial room for women writers, the foundation funds a big $50,000 grant aptly called the Gift of Freedom, which covers a woman's expenses while she works on a book for two years.  But it's not free form: you have to submit a plan to create your book, and your recent finances are scrutinized to weigh you ability to live within the funding and create a book. 

Likewise, the $10,000 Shakespeare's Sister fellowship is designed to help support a woman playwright start and compose an original play (not remake an old one), while working at various retreats.  Again, the writer has to have a completed a play already and thereby establish that they are capable of working on and completing a work in one year. 

The other literary grants they provide, To the Lighthouse and Clarissa Dalloway book prizes, and the Orlando prizes, are for smaller amounts of money and the publication of unpublished works.  They aren't sized to subsidize your life.  As a result, you aren't scrutinized to see if you can produce a work.  Remember that for every great amount, there are great strings.  It's not evil, it's common sense.

Grants for Travel.

Who’s going to pay you to travel? Some organizations will, but remember, it’s like any other grant—your interests have to align with the grantors! If you are thinking, “who’s going to finance my vacation?” the answer is probably nobody. But if you’re thinking, “I need money to study French culture and language in France”, then maybe the Societe des Professeurs Francais et Franophones d'Amerique can help. Or, if you want to study Polish culture, the Kosciuszko Foundation might be what you want. The same is true if you want to study in a Scandinavian country—the American-Scandinavian Society may be what you are looking for. If you wish to provide service to other countries, the Rotary Club has scholarships for that purpose.


Here’s a strategy for finding cultural scholarships: go to Foundation Grants to Individuals (available at more than 600 U.S.cooperating collection libraries), and in the Type of Support box, type travel. In the geographic focus box, type international. Another field that tends to give grants to individuals to travel and study is the arts. If you are an artist, try using travel in the Type of Support box, and Arts in the Field of Interests. Using this strategy, you can find organizations like Meet the Composer, which sponsors travel expenses for composers.

Besides foundations, the government also sponsors some travel for study and work purposes. The National Security Education Program offers the Boren Scholarships for travel and study in strategically important foreign countries. The National Endowment for the Arts has grants to support travel for writers to further their work, too.

If you are need funds for biomedical research-related travel, you can use Scan Grants, a free database of non-federal grants in the field. One of the categories on the right hand side of the page is travel grants—click it and you get the full list. But if you want to narrow it down to grants relevant to your needs, do a more complex search, and choose the travel category, with a word search in your field, like "cancer" or "dermatology." You will get a list of grants for travel to conferences, study, or other research.