G&A: The Contest Blog

The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) has announced the creation of the John Leonard Award, a new prize honoring a first book of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, biography, criticism, or autobiography. The recipient of the award—who will be selected by the NBCC’s member critics and editors—will be announced at the annual NBCC awards ceremony in early 2014.

The new award is named in honor of John Leonard, a literary critic and former editor of the New York Times Book Review. A founding member of the NBCC, Leonard (1939–2008) was known not only for his criticism of books, film, and television, but also for his encouragement of young critics and the attention he paid to debut writers. “One of the first American critics to write on Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Leonard shared his enthusiasms with a wide reading audience,” the NBCC reported in a press release. “In creating the John Leonard Award, the NBCC recognizes his commitment to nurturing new authors.”

Founded in 1974, the National Book Critics Circle Awards are given annually "to honor outstanding writing and to foster a national conversation about reading, criticism, and literature." The awards are open to any book in English, including translations, published in the United States in the previous year. Poet D.A. Powell and fiction writer Ben Fountain received the 2012 awards. The John Leonard Award will be the first award selected directly by the NBCC’s membership—which is comprised of nearly five hundred book critics, editors, and authors nationwide—rather than by its board of directors.

American author Lydia Davis has won the fifth Man Booker International Prize. The award, worth £60,000 (approximately $90,000), was presented to Davis yesterday at an awards ceremony in London. 

Davis, whose recent prose chapbook, The Cows, was published by Sarabande Books in 2011, and whose collaborative work, Two American Scenes, is just out as part of the New Directions poetry pamphlet series, is best known for her short stories, which are often noted for their brevity. Christopher Ricks, chairman of the Man Booker International Prize panel of judges, said Davis’s “writings fling their lithe arms wide to embrace many a kind. Just how to categorize them? They have been called stories but could equally be miniatures, anecdotes, essays, jokes, parables, fables, texts, aphorisms or even apophthegms, prayers, or simply observations.”

Davis is the author of nine story collections and one novel, The End of the Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994). She is also a translator of French literature, most notably Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. 

The Man Booker International Prize is given biennially to a fiction writer from any country for a body of work. Living authors who have published fiction originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language are eligible. The winner is chosen solely at the discretion of the judging panel, which this year included Ricks, Elif Batuman, Aminatta Forna, Yiyun Li, and Tim Parks. 

The finalists were U. R. Ananthamurthy, Aharon Appelfeld, Intizar Husain, Yan Lianke, Marie NDiaye, Josip Novakovich, Marilynne Robinson, Vladimir Sorokin, and Peter Stamm. The previous prize winners have included Chinua Achebe, Ismail Kadaré, Alice Munro, and Philip Roth.

Katherine Noble, a senior in the English Department at the University of Texas in Austin, has received the Keene Prize for Literature for her collection of poems, “Like Electrical Fire Across the Silence.” She will receive $50,000. 

Noble is the first undergraduate to win or even place in the Keene competition, one of the world’s largest student literary prizes, which has been given annually to University of Texas students since 2006. Graduate students in the university’s Michener Center MFA program typically take home the award. 

“The judges were impressed by her audacious combination of spirituality with sexuality, by her wide range of literary reference, and her bold experimentation with the form of the prose poem,” said Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, chair of the Department of English and the award selection committee, of Nobel’s poems.

“I have been affected by images from biblical myths since I was a young girl,” Noble said in a press release, “and the narrators in my poems often wrestle to understand how God interacts with the physical world.”

In addition to Noble, three finalists will each receive $17,000. They are Corey Miller, a current Michener Center graduate student, for his collection of poems “The New Concentration”; Karan Mahajan, also a Michener Center graduate student, for an excerpt from his novel “Notes on a Small Bomb”; and Jenn Shapland, an English Department graduate student, for her essay collection “Finders Keepers.”

Fiction writer Fiona McFarlane, a Michener Center graduate, whose stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Missouri Review, and elsewhere, received the 2012 prize. 

Established by the the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas, the Keene Prize is given in honor of E. L. Keene, a 1942 graduate of the university who “envisioned an award that would enhance and enrich the university’s prestige and support the work of young writers,” which would be given for “the most vivid and vital portrayal of the American experience in microcosm.” The award is given to enrolled undergraduate or graduate students for poetry, fiction, nonfiction, or plays. 

In celebration of National Short Story Month, the arts and culture website Flavorwire has announced the launch of its first-ever short fiction contest. The winner will receive $500 and publication on the Flavorwire website.

Fiction writers may submit a previously unpublished story of up to five thousand words by e-mail (in the body of a message, not as an attachment) along with a brief author biography and contact information to flavorwirefiction@gmail.com by Friday, May 17. There is no entry fee. 

Flavorwire literary editor Emily Temple will judge, and the winner will be announced on May 24. The winning story and a selection of honorable mentions will be published on the website during the final week of May.

For more information about Flavorwire or the short fiction contest, visit the website—and while you’re there, check out eight fascinating stories behind classic book titles. 

Bauhan Publishing is currently accepting submissions for its third annual May Sarton New Hampshire Book Prize. An award of one thousand dollars, publication, and one hundred author copies is given for a poetry collection.

Poets may submit a previously unpublished manuscript of fifty to eighty pages, written in English, with a $25 entry fee by June 30. Submissions are accepted by postal mail or via the online submission system. Jeff Friedman will judge. 

The prize, first given in 2011, is named in honor of the late American poet, novelist, and memoirist May Sarton. Originally open only to first collections, the prize is now also open to poets with previously published books. Rebecca Givens Rolland won the 2011 prize for her collection The Wreck of Birds; Nils Michals won the 2012 prize for Come Down to Earth.

Founded in 1959, the Peterborough–based Bauhan Publishing is an independent press that publishes books with a New England regional focus, including poetry collections and nonfiction works on the topics of history, art, and nature. General submissions are considered year-round. 

Last week, the first annual Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction was awarded to Don DeLillo, the author of sixteen novels, including White Noise (Viking, 1985), Libra (Viking, 1988), and Underworld (Scribner, 1997) and, most recently, the short story collection The Angel Esmeralda (Scribner, 2011). 

DeLillo, 76, was nominated by a panel of prize-winning authors and literary critics, and will receive the award at the Library of Congress National Book Festival in September. Among a lifetime of literary accolades, DeLillo has twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize—for Mao II (Viking, 1991) and Underworld—received a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award for White Noise, and was a finalist for last year’s Story Prize. In addition to his full-length works, DeLillo has also penned a number of plays, screenplays, short stories, and essays. 

“Like Dostoyevsky, Don DeLillo probes deeply into the sociopolitical and moral life of his country,” Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said in the April 25 announcement. “Over a long and important career, he has inspired his readers with the diversity of his themes and the virtuosity of his prose.”

In a statement, DeLillo—a first generation Italian American born and raised in the Bronx—said, “When I received news of this award, my first thoughts were of my mother and father, who came to this country the hard way, as young people confronting a new language and culture. In a significant sense, the Library of Congress Prize is the culmination of their efforts and a tribute to their memory.”

The new prize is inspired by the Creative Achievement Award for fiction, previously given by the Library to Herman Wouk in 2008, John Grisham in 2009, Isabel Allende in 2010, Toni Morrison in 2011, and Philip Roth in 2012. The Prize for American Fiction will, according to the announcement, be given annually "to honor an American writer whose body of work is distinguished not only for its mastery of the art but for its originality of thought and imagination. The award seeks to commend strong, unique, enduring voices that—throughout long, consistently accomplished careers—have told us something about the American experience.”

DeLillo, who often admits that his long career took some time to get started, is currently at work on a novel. 

Submissions are currently open for Black Balloon Publishing’s inaugural Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize, an award of $5,000 and a book deal with Black Balloon given for a fiction manuscript. The deadline is May 6. 

Previously unpublished novels and short story collections of at least 50,000 words are eligible. Fiction writers may submit an excerpt of no more than 4,000 words via Submittable by May 6. Those who are selected to move on to the second round of judging will have one week after being notified to submit their final manuscript. Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but entrants must notify Black Balloon if a manuscript is accepted for publication elsewhere. Short story collections containing previously published stories are eligible. There is no entry fee.
 

According to the Black Balloon editors, “we champion the weird, the unwieldy, and the unclassifiable. We are battle-worn enemies of boredom and we’re looking for books that defy the rules, bend reality, twist preconceptions, and imagine the unimaginable.”

An independent press based in New York City, Black Balloon accepts submissions of literary fiction, nonfiction, and memoir year-round through its online submission form. The press also produces the Airship, a digital daily that features emerging writers from across the country. 

The book prize is named for Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, a one-eyed and one-armed British naval commander made famous for his victories against the French during the Napoleonic Wars—a man, the Black Balloon editors write, “who defied convention at every turn.” 

The Butler University–based literary magazine Booth is currently accepting short story submissions for its annual literary prize. The winner will receive $1,000 and publication in Booth. The deadline is May 31. 

Using the online submission system, writers may submit a story between 500 and 7,500 words with a $20 entry fee. All entries will be considered for publication. One runner-up will receive $250. Roxane Gay will judge. Butler University students and staff, as well as friends and students of the judge, are not eligible to enter. 

Established in 2009, Booth publishes two print issues per year, and features one author or new piece of writing on its website every week. The staff is comprised of students in the MFA program at Butler University in Indianapolis. The annual prize alternates genres each year, and the editors accept general submissions, including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and comics, from September through April. 

Visit the website for more information and complete submission guidelines, and check out the current installation of Poets & Writers Magazine's Literary MagNet to hear more from the Booth editors about future plans for the journal. 

The current issue of Booth, above, features cover art and interior comics by Dustin Harbin. 

The Pulitzer Prize board announced the winners and finalists of the 2013 Pulitzer Prizes today in New York City. Of the twenty-one categories, the prizes in letters are given annually for works published in the previous year by American authors.

The winner in fiction is The Orphan Master’s Son (Random House) by Adam Johnson. The finalists were Nathan Englander's What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (Knopf) and Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child (Little, Brown). The winner in poetry is Stag’s Leap (Knopf) by Sharon Olds. The finalists were Collected Poems by the late Jack Gilbert (Knopf) and The Abundance of Nothing by Bruce Weigl (TriQuarterly). The winner in general nonfiction is Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys (Harper) by Gilbert King. The finalists were Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House) and David George Haskell’s The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature (Viking).

Pulitzer Prize Administrator Sig Gissler announced the winners and finalists today at Columbia University. At a ceremony on May 20, each winner will receive $10,000.

The prize board caused a stir last year when it failed to select a winner in fiction, leaving many in the literary world—including Denis Johnson and Karen Russell, who joined the late David Foster Wallace as fiction finalists—feeling slighted, and wondering if this year’s awards would prove different. The 2013 awards were given in all twenty-one categories; visit the website for a complete list of winners.

The Pulitzer Prizes were established in 1911 by Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian-American journalist and newspaper publisher. A portion of his bequest was used to found the Columbia University School of Journalism in 1912 and establish the Pulitzer Prizes, which were first awarded in 1917.

Submissions to be considered for the 2014 prizes will open in May.