Chosen from a group of fourteen finalists that included American authors Evan S. Connell, E. L. Doctorow, and Joyce Carol Oates, Canadian author Alice Munro today was named winner of the third Man Booker International Prize. "I am totally amazed and delighted," the seventy-seven-year-old fiction writer said. The biannual award, sponsored by Man Group, the investment company and hedge fund that sponsors the annual Man Booker Prize, is worth around eighty-five thousand dollars.

The judges were Amit Chaudhuri, Andrey Kurkov, and Jane Smiley, who wrote in a joint statement: “Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels. To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before.”

Munro, who lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron, is the author of seventeen books, including Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), The Beggar’s Maid (1980), Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), and Away From Her (2007). Her next collection of short stories, Too Much Happiness, will be published in October.

Below is a short interview with Munro that was produced in 2004, around the time her story collection Runaway was published. 

The French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation announced today the winners of the twenty-second-annual translation prizes for fiction and nonfiction. The awards of ten thousand dollars each were given for English translations of French prose published last year. Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays won in fiction for their translation of Small Lives (Archipelago Books) by Pierre Michon. Matthew Cobb and Malcolm DeBevoise won in nonfiction for Life Explained (Yale University Press/Odile Jacob) by Michel Morange. The winners will be honored tonight at a ceremony at the Century Association in New York City.

“These translation awards are an important opportunity to bring publishing professionals, translators and writers together to draw public attention to outstanding translations of literary works—which can often go unnoticed,” said French-American Foundation program director Emma Archer in a press release. “Translation is key to perpetuating an ongoing conversation between cultures and to promote the circulation of literary works at a time where the dominant language is English."

Jurors for this year's competition were Linda Asher, Tom Bishop, Antoine Compagnon, Linda Coverdale, Richard Howard, and Lily Tuck. 

The University of Texas, Austin, recently announced that Sarah Bird and Diane Wilson are the winners of this year's Dobie Paisano Writing Fellowships. Both will receive a four-month stay at Paisano, a retreat west of Austin, and a monthly stipend of five thousand dollars. The fellowships, sponsored by the University of Texas and the Texas Institute of Letters, allow Texas writers (or writers who have written significantly about Texas) to live and work at the late J. Frank Dobie’s 254-acre ranch.

And just who, exactly, was J. Frank Dobie? He was an old-school Texan who wrote a bunch of books, including Cow People (1964) and Rattlesnakes (1965), that depicted the good life in rural Texas. But don't take my word for it; watch the well-groomed gentleman in the video below. 

This time of year you can almost feel the collective anxiety of students across the country who already have or will soon graduate and face the job market. And this year, of course, nerves are a little more frayed than usual. As short story writer Donald Ray Pollock said, as he accepted the PEN American Center's $35,000 PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship a couple nights ago, “This is a big deal for me. And it couldn’t come at a better time. I’m getting ready to get out of graduate school, and there are no jobs out there."

It may not be worth as much as Pollack's new fellowship, but the Nation has a contest that will help a couple winners out with a thousand dollars each—and, perhaps more important, publication in a weekly magazine with a circulation of around 180,000. This year's Nation Student Writing Contest, sponsored by the BIL Charitable Trust, aims to "recognize and reward the best in student writing and thinking." Matriculating high school students and undergraduates at American schools, colleges, and universities—as well as those receiving either high school or college degrees in 2009—are invited to submit essays of no more than eight hundred words that answer the following question:

How has the recession affected you, your family, or someone you know?

Two winners, one from high school and one from college, will receive a thousand dollars and a subscription to the Nation; five finalists will receive two hundred dollars and subscriptions. The winners will be published in the magazine and online; the finalists, only online.

The deadline is May 31. The winners will be announced September 15. Click here for complete guidelines.

"I don't want to read short fiction. I don't want to curl up with a collection of short stories. It's totally boring." Whether you agree with them or not, those words, spoken by agent Jeff Kleinman during the Agents and Editors interview published in the January/February 2009 issue, represent the views of a not-insignificant number of publishing professionals. (Which is partly why some people are trying to get a Short Story Month going, but that's another story.)

Fortunately, for short story writers (and readers) everywhere there are still contests like the annual Flannery O'Connor Awards series, which offers two prizes of $1,000 each and publication by University of Georgia Press for short story collections. Some great books have been published as a result of the competition: Just last fall, Andrew Porter's The Theory of Light and Matter and Peter Selgin's Drowning Lessons were published. And this fall will see the publication of last year's winners: Geoffrey Becker (Black Elvis) and Lori Ostlund (The Bigness of the World).

The University of Georgia Press recently named a new editor for the series, former Flannery O'Connor Award-winner Nancy Zafris, who offers a note about the blind selection process on the press's Web site. She also adds a little description of how she approaches her reading of the finalists as series editor: "I always begin with an open mind—a mood of receptivity. However, it is the author’s job to meet my expectations, my desire to be delighted or charmed or moved. This means that writers need to work very hard on their opening pages. Tell your story in your own (authentic) quiet or loud or funny voice and I’ll give your story a chance."

If you want to give her a chance to give you a chance, submit your story collection by May 31.

Dalkey Archive Press recently announced that it has chosen four young literary translators as winners of its first Applied Translation fellowship program. Rhett Warren McNeil, Ursula Meany Scott, Jamie Richards, and Kerri Pierce were chosen from more than 130 applicants from 35 countries.

According to the press's Web site, the program was created "in response to the need on a national and international level for providing practical experience to young literary translators." Each fellow will receive an eighteen-thousand-dollar stipend to work at Dalkey Archive for one year, "gaining experience in translation and learning about the publishing industry while also participating in other aspects of the international literary community."

By the end of the year, each fellow will have translated a complete book to be published by the press. They will also be involved with the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where the press is based.

In a press release, Dalkey Archive’s publisher John O’Brien said, “I’ve always felt that creating opportunities for young people to make a contribution to the literary community is an important part of Dalkey Archive’s nonprofit mission. We’ve worked with students for years, at every academic level and in various capacities, but never before on this scale. We plan to expand this program in the coming years, and hope it becomes a model for other institutions to help develop the field of literary translation.”

Amazon announced on Friday that book editors at Penguin selected three finalists from a pool of one hundred semifinalists for the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. They are "Stuff of Legends" by Ian Gibson, "Bill Warrington's Last Chance" by James King, and "In Malice, Quite Close" by Brandi Lynn Ryder.

Amazon customers can download excerpts of the three manuscripts and vote for the winner through Thursday. The winner, who will receive a publishing contract from Penguin, will be announced next Wednesday.

Last year's winner was Bill Loehfelm for his novel Fresh Kills. As we reported earlier this year, the contest has elicited its share of criticism—but then perhaps that's the whole point.

The BBC announced yesterday that nineteen titles have been named to the longlist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction, several of which readers would have no difficulty placing in the "creative nonfiction" category. Among these are Swiss author Alain de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, an exploration of the modern workplace in all its forms. From the book's promotional copy: "We spend most of our waking lives at work—in occupations often chosen by our unthinking younger selves. And yet we rarely ask ourselves how we got there or what our occupations mean to us." Published in the U.K. in April by Hamish Hamilton, it is forthcoming from Pantheon Books in June.

Other notable titles on the longlist include Philip Hoare's Leviathan (Fourth Estate, 2008) and David Grann's The Lost City of Z (Simon & Schuster, 2009). Bookseller.com has the entire longlist. The winner, who will be announced on June 30, receives twenty thousand pounds (or just over thirty thousand dollars). 

Below is a video of Alain de Botton (who last year helped establish London's School of Life, a refreshingly simple take on education) discussing his new book earlier this year in Melbourne. Best line? Might be the one at the beginning: "To be a modern human being—to be alive in the modern world—is never to be far from a career crisis."

And on that note, enjoy your weekend!

Given the overwhelming response to our May 1 post, "Who Should Have Won? A Writer's Spectator Sport," (cricket...cricket) here's another chance to be the judge.

Which of the following books of poetry and fiction (all of them published in these first five months of 2009, some having appeared in Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin) do you think will win one of the big literary awards—Pulitzer, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards, etc.? (Note to the crowd of readers, clamoring to post comments, who notice a glaring omission: Feel free to make your voices heard).

Poetry
Portait and Dream: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press) by Bill Berkson
Romanticism (Norton) by April Bernard
See Jack (University of Pittsburgh Press) by Russell Edson
Selected Poems (FSG) by Michael Hofmann
Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Ecco) by Campbell McGrath
Chronic (Graywolf Press) by D. A. Powell
The Dangerous Shirt (Copper Canyon Press) by Alberto Ríos
Poems 1959-2009 (FSG) by Frederick Seidel
The Great Wave (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) by Ron Slate
Assorted Poems (FSG) by Susan Wheeler

Fiction
The Sky Below (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) by Stacey D'Erasmo
Out of My Skin (FSG) by John Haskell
Nobody Move (FSG) by Denis Johnson
Castle (Graywolf Press) by J. Robert Lennon
How It Ended (Knopf) by Jay McInerney
Pygmy (Doubleday) by Chuck Palahniuk
Miles From Nowhere (Riverhead Books) by Nami Mun
Ruins (Akashic Books) by Achy Obejas
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (FSG) by Wells Tower
Sag Harbor (Doubleday) by Colson Whitehead

To find out of you're right, we'll have to wait a while—the National Book Awards will likely be announced in November; the National Book Critics Circle Awards, next March; and the Pulitzers and the Tufts Awards, next April—but just think of how shrewd you'll feel if you predict correctly.

It's easy to get caught up in the details of who won which award and how big the cash prize was and when the winning book is going to be published. These are all important details, no doubt, but every once and a while a contest or a sponsoring organization comes along that offers a little perspective to the competition, reminding those of us who pay such close attention to the deadlines and the recent winners that the people who run the magazines and the small presses and the nonprofits that make the contests possible are often doing what they're doing for very personal reasons.

Robert Nazarene named his Chesterfield, Missouri-based literary magazine Margie to honor his late sister's memory. Marjorie J. Wilson died in 1977 at the age of twenty-two. The annual journal also sponsors a number of writing contests, several of which are also named after late family members. The Marjorie J. Wilson Award, worth a thousand dollars, is given annually for a single poem. (This year's deadline has been extended to May 29.) The Robert E. and Ruth I. Wilson Poetry Book Award, given annually for a book-length poetry collection, is named for Nazarene's grandparents. And the newly created Auntie Ann Book Award, which will be given for a book-length collection of poetry (the deadline is August 31), is named for his aunt.

In a recent e-mail, Nazarene explained the personal importance of this suite of contests:

"Our 'Auntie Ann' was aunt to Margie, myself, James [Margie's senior editor], and our brother Tom. Also to my children, Bobby and Madelyn. She was of extremely modest means. And yet, she never missed a birthday or Christmas card to any of us...and it always included a far more generous check than she could afford. She was so kind. And she gave us all back rubs whenever we wanted them. Similarly, the Robert E. and Ruth I. Wilson Poetry Book Award is in honor of our grandparents. Neither our grandparents nor our Auntie Ann had the opportunity of education. In fact, my grandfather, Robert E. Lee Wilson, went to work at nine to support his mother and six siblings when his father (an alcoholic) abandoned the family. In any event, none of these dear people ever went beyond the eighth grade. We know they are smiling at the literary awards named in their honor. ... They all loved Margie with all their hearts and were dumbfounded with grief when we lost her at age twenty-two in 1977."

The literary magazine Margie, Nazarene added, "is not about a what, it's all about a who and our attempt to keep her voice alive and ringing."