Annie Baker Wins Blackburn Prize and Horton Foote Honor

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Annie Baker

Annie Baker has been awarded the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, an international award given annually since 1978 to women who have written works of outstanding quality. The prize, which Ms. Baker won for “The Flick,” her three-hour incisively nuanced exploration of love and friendship, includes a cash award of $25,000 and a signed, numbered print by the artist Willem de Kooning.

Cynthia Nixon, one of six judges on this year’s panel, presented the prize to Ms. Baker at a private ceremony on Sunday at the lley Theater in Houston. Ms. Baker was also chosen as the second recipient of the Horton Foote Legacy Project, which includes a four-week writing residency, starting in May, at Foote’s preserved home in Wharton, Tex.

Reviewing Ms. Baker’s “Flick,” which is in its premiere run at Playwrights Horizons in Manhattan, Charles Isherwood wrote in The New York Times that “Ms. Baker, one of the freshest and most talented dramatists to emerge Off Broadway in the past decade, writes with tenderness and keen insight about the way people make messes of their lives â€" and the lives of people they care about â€" and then sink into benumbed impotence, hard pressed to see any way of cleaning things up.”

More than 100 plays were considered for the 2013 pr! ize. Besides Ms. Baker’s award, nine finalists received $2,500 prizes. They are Karen Ardiff (“The Godess of Liberty”), Jean Betts (“Genesis Falls”), Deborah Bruce (“The Distance”), Katherine Chandler (“Before It Rains”), Amy Herzog (“ Belleville”), Dawn King (“Foxfinder”), Laura Marks (“Bethany”), Jenny Schwartz (“Somewhere Fun”) and Francine Volpe (“The Good Mother”).