Two Texas establishments are looking to honor books authored by home state poets and fiction writers.

Recently published writers from Texas or who write about Texas themes could be eligible for prizes ranging from twelve hundred dollars to six thousand dollars.

Texas Christian University's biennial TCU Texas Book Award, which offers a prize of five thousand dollars, is open until December 31 to books of prose "about Texas" that were published in 2009 and 2010. The award has recognized one writer of literary fiction or creative nonfiction since the inaugural prize in 2003, Stephen Harrigan's Gates of the Alamo (Knopf, 2000), which was set in nineteenth-century Texas (others have been given to research-based nonfiction writers).

The Texas Institute of Letters is also seeking literary standouts in poetry, short fiction, and the novel for its literary awards. The six-thousand-dollar Jesse H. Jones Award is given for a novel or short story collection, and two one-thousand-dollar awards are given for a first book of fiction and a published short story. One volume of poetry is recognized with the twelve-hundred-dollar Helen C. Smith Memoiral Award, and a writer of nonfiction (including creative nonfiction) will receive the Carr P. Collins Award of five thousand dollars. Eligible titles, published in 2010, should be submitted directly to the judges by January 8, 2011.

And for Texas writers of any publishing stripe longing for time to write? Now might be the time to check out the residency fellowships offered by the University of Texas at J. Frank Dobie's former ranch house west of Austin. The application deadline is January 15, 2011.

Britain-based indie Holland Park Press is holding its first, free competition for a short story, with a prize of one hundred pounds sterling (roughly $150) and publication in the press's online magazine. The King of Tuzla Short Story Competition, named after the press's recently published novel by Dutch poet and fiction writer Arnold Jansen op de Haar, is open to stories set in a conflict zone similar to the one the author creates in his book, set during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia (Tuzla is a city in Bosnia and Herzegovina that witnessed a civilian massacre in 1995).

Eligible stories, limited to one thousand words, should approach a narrative from the point of view of a single main character and must be set in the past or present, but not the future. "Your tale could unfold, for example, during the troubles in Northern Ireland," the press states in its guidelines. "It could just as well describe life in a refugee camp during the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, or take place in the present time inside a remote village in Afghanistan."

The deadline for entries is December 31, and stories must be sent via e-mail. Instructions on how to compile a submission are available on the press's Web site.

In the video below, King of Tuzla author Arnold Jansen op de Haar, also an ex-soldier, gives a tour of his writing space and reads from his published works.

The longlist for the fourth annual Man Asian Literary Prize was announced earlier this week, honoring ten writers hailing from four countries. Among the semifinalists for the thirty-thousand-dollar prize are five novelists whose books are available in English from U.S. publishers, including one independent press. (All eligible titles, by Asian authors, must be written in or translated into English, a reversal of the original rule, which stated that books entered must not have yet been released in English.)

The longlisted titles with editions published in the United States are Three Sisters (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) by Bi Feiyu, Dahanu Road (HarperCollins) by Anosh Irani, Serious Men (Norton) by Manu Joseph, The Changeling (Grove Press) by Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, and Hotel Iris (Picador) by Yoko Ogawa. Tiger Hills by Sarita Mandanna will be published in March by Grand Central Publishing.

Honored works that have yet to make their way to a U.S. house are Way to Go by Upamanyu Chatterjee, The Thing About Thugs by Tabish Khair, Monkey-Man by Usha K. R., and Below the Crying Mountain by Criselda Yabes.

A shortlist will be revealed in February, and judges Monica Ali, Homi K. Bhabha, and Hsu-Ming Teo will select the winner, to be announced in mid-March. Submissions for the 2011 prize open in May.

In the video below, Mandanna reads a passage from her debut Tiger Hills.

Earlier this week, the Center for Fiction in New York City presented its (newly-renamed) Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize to a decorated veteran of the U.S. Marines whose debut novel tells a story informed by his time serving in Vietnam. Author Karl Marlantes received the ten-thousand-dollar award for his book, Matterhorn (Grove/Atlantic), selected by jurors Oscar Hijuelos, Sheila Kohler, John Pipkin, Dawn Raffel, and John Wray.

Also this week, United States Artists announced its 2010 fellows. Honored this year with awards of fifty thousand dollars each are poet Martín Espada, whose collection Trouble Ball is forthcoming in 2011 from Norton; poet and translator Khaled Mattawa, whose most recent book is Tocqueville (New Issues Poetry and Prose); poet Brighde Mullins, also a playwright, author of the chapbook Water Stories (Slapering Hol Press, 2003), and fiction writer Susan Steinberg, whose most recent short story collection is Hydroplane (Fiction Collective Two, 2006).

The awards honor artistic excellence in the field, determined by a panel of writers' peers. Fellowships are also given annually to playwrights, dramatists, filmmakers, visual artists, folk artists, and musicians—thirty in all this year.

In the video below, USA fellow Steinberg performs her story "Powerhouse" at a reading for the Rumpus.

The Spanish Ministry of Culture announced recently that its Cervantes Prize, given annually to a Spanish or Latin American writer for lifetime achievement, will go to for the third time to a woman—Spanish novelist Ana María Matute. The eighty-five-year-old author of The Lost Children (MacMillan, 1965) and Soldiers Cry at Night (Latin American Literary Review Press, 1995) will receive her award of 125,000 euros (approximately $165,000) on the 395th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra on April 23, 2011.

"I am happy, enormously happy," Matute said in response to the announcement of her award. "I take it as a recognition, if not of the quality of my work, then at least of the effort and dedication that I have devoted to writing throughout my life."

Matute joins on the short list of women honorees Cuban-born poet Dulce María Loynaz, whose works have been collected in English translation most recently in Against Heaven (Carcanet Press, 2007) and Woman in Her Garden (White Pine Press, 2002), and Spanish essayist María Zambrano, one of whose books, Delirium and Destiny: A Spaniard in Her Twenties, was published in translation by State University of New York Press in 1999. Other past winners of the Cervantes Prize include Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, José Emilio Pacheco, Octavio Paz, and this year's Nobel Prize winner, Mario Vargas Llosa.

Among Matute's works in English, in addition to the titles above, are Celebration in the Northwest (University of Nebraska Press, 1997), Trap (Latin American Literary Review Press, 1996), and School of the Sun (Pantheon, 1963). According to the Spanish Ministry of Culture, her books have been translated into twenty-three languages.

The first journal tailored exclusively to its eponymous form, Creative Nonfiction is holding a themed contest in anticipation of its Summer 2011 issue. Judged by New Yorker writer and author of The Orchid Thief (Random House, 1998) Susan Orlean, the competition is open to true stories concerning the night. (The contest Web page offers a few ideas: "It was a dark and stormy night; "Strangers in the Night"; the night sky; Friday Night Lights; things that go bump in the night; Take Back the Night; night owls; The Night Before Christmas; The Night Watch; In the Night Kitchen; The Armies of the Night; "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down"; prom night; date night; Good Night, Nurse!")

The writer of the winning essay will receive five thousand dollars, and the winning piece will be published in the magazine. One runner up will receive $2,500 and online publication.

The prize is cosponsored by the Salt Institute, a Portland, Maine, a center for aspiring nonfiction story–telling writers, radio producers, and photographers that offers a range of classes to college and graduate students and awards a certificate in documentary studies (as well as transferable credits). Pending acceptance to the institute, the two top honorees in Creative Nonfiction's "Night" contest have to option to apply their awards funds directly to tuition at Salt.

To find details on how to submit your essay of up to four thousand words (with a twenty dollar entry fee), visit the Creative Nonfiction Web site. The deadline for entry is January 10, 2011.

In the video below, Orlean reveals a bit about her literary predilections—through her desert island book picks.

Should MFA students think about finding an agent before graduating? How should they approach agents? And what do agents think about working with MFA grads? We asked literary agent Dorian Karchmar of the William Morris Agency, whose client list includes Helene Cooper, Guy Fieri, Kate Jacobs, Jennifer Haigh, and Jennifer Vanderbes, these questions and more.

Where do you find your new talent?
Referrals are the primary thing—mostly clients who recommend me to friends of theirs who are writing. Also editors refer promising people to me. Sometimes an editor will go to an MFA program or a conference. Editors are, for the most part, not going to sign up a writer without an agent, so oftentimes they will put my name into the mix if they are interested in someone.

What do you look for in a query letter?
Doing a query correctly is important. When writers query me, and it’s clear they’ve done their homework—they know who I am, have listened to my interviews, and know my list—then, of course, I will take them very seriously. I get queries all the time from people who graduated from Iowa, Michigan, Columbia, The New School, five years or ten years prior and have been working on things ever since. That’s always very exciting to me. I really like seeing work from people who show a real writer’s level of commitment—people who are ready now, years after receiving their MFA, because they have the passion and the patience. Writing requires tremendous patience.

Are you wary of working with freshly graduated MFA students?
I am not wary of it at all. While certainly a number of students need to work harder and longer on what it is they have to say and how to say it, there are plenty of MFA students who have been out of school and working and also working on their writing before going back for their masters. These are not all twenty-one-year-olds.

Should MFA students even be thinking about agents?
MFA students shouldn’t be thinking about agents. They shouldn’t be thinking about what other people are doing. They shouldn’t be thinking about any of it. They should be thinking about the project they’re working on.

What’s the most important thing to take away from an MFA program?
One or two really trusted readers—people who are particularly good readers for your work and are tactful but ruthless about what is and is not working. Agents and editors are looking for work that has been taken as far as it can go. If you can come out of a program with a couple of people who really understand what you’re trying to do with a project and who can dig into the work and solve the problems, it is probably the single greatest value aside from being given a couple of years of time.

In publishing nonfiction, is it better to first publish a nonfiction piece in a magazine, and then try to craft it into a book? I think getting a piece in a magazine first can oftentimes be extremely helpful in raising the author’s profile and sousing out if the subject matter deserves a book. A lot of the time, a story can be told in a piece and doesn’t necessarily need to be a book.

You’ve said that critiquing is about the person’s work being as good as it can be, and that a true professional will embrace negative criticism. What about questions in workshops that seem to be more of a matter of taste? Should a student listen more to the professor? The students? Her friends? Whose opinion matters?
I think the question is, Do they seem to understand what it is you’re trying to do? Do they seem to understand the book or the story in the fundamental spirit of the thing? If the answer is yes, then they may have a pretty good idea about why it’s not working. Very often writers know what is working and what is not. Sometimes we don’t want to believe it because that might mean starting something over. And sometimes the answer lies in putting it aside for a while. Take great notes while people are giving you feedback and come back to it a little while later with those different notes in hand and see what seems to click.

No writer ever feels 100 percent about her work. How can she know when it's ready to be shown to an agent?
Whatever your self-criticism is, you can feel when you’ve taken a work as far as you can take it. Obviously you want your key readers to read it and feel it’s working, but the thing has to have its basic shape. It needs to be very clean; you need to understand what it is. It should never be, “I think there’s something here, and I want to get an agent’s take on it.” That’s a mistake. An agent is not your professor.

Along with its CreateSpace self-publishing platform and Penguin Group, Amazon once again will sponsor a prize for an unpublished or self-published novel. Works that have never been under contract and are written in English by authors in the United States and Canada (excluding the province of Québec), as well as twenty-one other countries, are eligible.

Past winners of the contest, which includes a fifteen-thousand-dollar prize and publication by Penguin, are Patricia McArdle for Farishta, James King for Bill Warrington's Last Chance, and Bill Loehfelm for Fresh Kills.

To enter, writers must first complete the free registration for CreateSpace. Then, between January 24 and February 6, 2011, the service will accept submissions of full novel manuscripts of 50,000 to 150,000 words each, along with an excerpt of and pitch for each work. There is no cost to submit, but once five thousand entries have been received, Amazon will close the contest.

Judging will take place in five rounds, commencing with Amazon editors reviewing pitch submissions. Titles whose pitches pass muster will advance, and excerpts of those works will be read by a selection of Amazon's customer reviewers. Reviewers for Publishers Weekly will then read the highest-rated 250 titles.

Fifty semifinalists will have their manuscripts assessed by editors at Penguin, and three finalists' works will advance to being read and reviewed by a group of literary professionals. This year's panelists are New York City author and book critic Lev Grossman, agent Jennifer Joel, and Putnam editor Marysue Rucci.

Finally, the public will have a chance to read the panelists' reviews and vote for a winner beginning in late May. The winner will be announced in June.

While entries for the novel contest (and the second-annual young adult novel contest) will not be accepted for another eight weeks, full guidelines and eligibility information are available now on the Amazon and CreateSpace Web sites.

The video below is a book trailer for King's winning book, which was published last August.

The Minnesota-based Bush Foundation, created in 1953 by Edyth Bassler Bush and 3M executive Archibald Granville Bush, announced last week that it will no longer administer its longstanding individual fellowship programs, including one targeted to artists. Instead of discipline-specific awards—grants had been offered specifically to artists, medical doctors, and nontraditional students—the organization will now run a single fellowship competition open to innovators of any stripe who are invested in social change in Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

"We need 'all hands on deck,'" the foundation says on its Web site, "every social entrepreneur, business owner, artist, public sector employee, community volunteer, and the like—to embrace the opportunity to learn and grow so others in our communities can have the hoped for future." The foundation says it will focus on tackling "tough problems through building individual leadership capacity," particularly in schools and with Native American nations working to rebuild their governments.

Since it began in 1976, 431 artists from Minnesota and the Dakotas received funds from the fellowship program, including poets Robert Bly and David Mura and memoirist Patricia Hampl. Guidelines for fellowship application and information about the new initiative will be posted on the Bush Foundation Web site tomorrow.

In the video below, Bly reads his poem "Driving Through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings" in an excerpt from the 1978 documentary on the poet, "A Man Writes to Part of Himself." (The film was released the same year that Bly received his first Bush Foundation artist fellowship).

The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Irish Book Awards were announced last week, both recognizing books by U.K. authors. In London, Orange Prize finalist Amy Sackville won the Rhys Prize, given for a work by a writer under thirty-five, for her novel, The Still Point (Portobello Books), and in Ireland, native Dubliner Emma Donoghue won the Novel of the Year prize at the Irish Book Awards for her best-selling novel Room (Picador, 2010) , which earlier this month took the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize in Canada and was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

The judges for the Rhys Prize, which awarded Sackville five thousand pounds (approximately $7,800), were critic Claire Allfree; Bidisha, who debuted on the literary scene at age sixteen with the novel Seahorses; and poet Maura Dooley.

Donoghue, whose book was shortlisted for Novel of the Year along with Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (Scribner, 2009), Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light (Harville Secker, 2010), and Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (Random House, 2009), was determined the winner of the Irish Book Award by public voting. Her novel received nearly thirty thousand nods.

In the video below, Donoghue discusses how she approached writing the child protagonist of her winning book.