G&A: The Contest Blog

The Caine Prize for African Writing, a major award given annually for a single short story written in English by an African writer, has been awarded to Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo, the pseudonym of Cornell University instructor Elizabeth Tshele. Since earning her MFA at Cornell, Tshele has remained with the university teaching composition and creative writing under the Truman Capote Fellowship.

The ten thousand pound prize (approximately sixteen thousand dollars) was awarded for the story "Hitting Budapest," published in the November/December 2010 issue of Boston Review. Tshele received her award at a ceremony in Oxford, England, yesterday.

"The language of ‘Hitting Budapest’ crackles," said chair of judges Hisham Matar. "This is a story with moral power and weight, it has the artistry to refrain from moral commentary. NoViolet Bulawayo is a writer who takes delight in language."

Also shortlisted for the award were Tim Keegan of South Africa for "What Molly Knew," Lauri Kubuitsile of Botswana for "In the spirit of McPhineas Lata," Beatrice Lamwaka of Uganda for "Butterfly dreams," and David Medalie of South Africa for "The Mistress’s Dog." All of the finalists' pieces originally appeared in story collections.

The Australian Prime Minister's Literary Awards were announced yesterday, recognizing noteworthy Australian novels and the "efforts and sacrifices" of their writers.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard presented the award for fiction to New Zealand native Stephen Daisley, whose debut novel, Traitor, was released last year by Text Publishing, an imprint of Penguin Australia.

Daisley, who now lives in Perth, Australia, received eighty thousand Australian dollars (roughly eighty-six thousand U.S. dollars), an award which the fifty-six-year-old author says will help his family "survive a bit more." The author, who worked without publication for twenty years, told the Sydney Morning Herald that he persevered with his work because writing is his "bliss."

The shortlisted novelists were each awarded five thousand Australian dollars (about five thousand four hundred U.S. dollars). They are Roberta Lowing for Notorious (Allen & Unwin), Roger McDonald for When Colts Ran (Random House), David Musgrave for Glissando: A Melodrama (Sleepers Publishing), and Kim Scott for That Deadman Dance (Macmillan).

The German Haus der Kulturen der Welt has awarded its twenty-five-thousand-euro (roughly thirty-five-thousand-dollar) International Literature Award to Russian writer Mikhail Schischkin for his novel Venushaar (Maiden's Hair). The novel, which has won several awards in Russia but took seven years to make its way into translation in Germany—and remains untranslated in the United States—was selected for the prize from among over one hundred books translated from twenty-four languages and originating in fifty countries.

Among the finalists for the prize, which honors translations of books from any language into German, were Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat for the translation of her memoir Brother, I'm Dying, which was published by Knopf in the United States in 2007; Elias Khoury for Yalo, originally written in Arabic and released in English by Archipelago Books in 2008; and Mathias Énard for Zone, translated from the French and published last December in English by Open Letter. A list of all the finalists and their German publishers is available on the prize website.

The jury, comprised of editors, translators, critics, and authors, called Schischkin a "wordsmith of the highest order" who has "developed a unique form of novel" and "plays with
perspectives and settings, with the most diverse verbal registers and stylistic positions." His translator, Andreas Tretner of Berlin, who has been translating works from the Russian, Czech, and Bulgarian since the mid-eighties, was also praised for "finding a German lid for every Russian pot."

This summer SMITH Magazine is bringing writers another of its famed challenges in literary brevity.

Amidst this weekend's celebrations of liberty from it, perhaps now's the perfect time to reflect on the contest theme—work—using six words exactly.

From now until Labor Day, a new sub-theme will be introduced every two weeks, and writers are invited to enter their six-word memoir on that particular aspect of work on the SMITH website. This week's competition, judged by The Happiness Project author Gretchen Rubin, asks, "Why do you do what you do?" (Some recent entries: "Who doesn't love the payroll lady?" and "I can work in my slippers.")

There is no fee to enter, and the magazine is partnering with Mercer, a human resources firm, to offer the winner of each two-week-long challenge an iPad2 or Blackberry Playbook. All entries will also be considered for a Six Words About Work book. For more information, to read entries, and to submit your own, visit the contest web page.

A nearly seventy-year-old literary award that honored works in all genres by young, emerging writers is buckling under the pressure of budget woes. Booktrust, the organization that has for the past nine years sponsored the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, given since 1942 to writers under the age of thirty-five, announced earlier this week that government funding cuts forced it to revamp its program portfolio, shuttering the award—at least for 2011.

The prize, according to author Margaret Drabble, who won the award in 1966 and lamented its loss in the Guardian, is "one of the most romantic and distinguished of prizes," more so than the oldest major U.K. award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, or the Booker. The five-thousand-pound award (roughly eight thousand dollars) is given to writers "at the outset of their careers, when a sign of approval means much more than it does in their cynical, competitive, commercial later years."

The 2009 winner, Evie Wyld—who won for her novel, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice (Pantheon)—says the award "gave me a platform to work off, and I'm not sure I'd be in the position I am in now, had the Rhys not brought such a large amount of attention with it," including radio appearances and articles. Among the other poets and prose writers who have taken the prize in the past are Angela Carter, Andrew Motion, V. S. Naipaul, and Jeanette Winterson.

Booktrust, which is pursuing alternate avenues for maintaining the prize, told the Guardian it hopes to bring the Rhys "back with a bang as soon as possible," possibly even in 2012.

In the video below, Wyld reads from her winning book, a "romantic thriller about men who aren't talking."

Kore Press, whose mission is to publish diverse works by women writers, has temporarily suspended its eight-years-running poetry book competition for 2011. The nonprofit publisher will resume the contest in 2012, following a period of restructuring that, according to the press's business and marketing manager, necessitates a hiatus.

The short fiction contest will go on as planned this year, and the winner of last year's poetry book contest will see her debut published, as well. Michelle Chan Brown's Double Agent will be released in the fall.

In the video below, Brown reads from her chapbook, Clever Little Decoys, published by Love Among the Ruins last year.

Poetry and prose publisher Black Lawrence Press is accepting entries to its multi-genre book contest, with a special deal for writers who submit before June 30.

Entry to the St. Lawrence Book Award competition, open to both poetry and short story manuscripts, is fifteen dollars (reduced from twenty-five) until next Thursday. (The press offered a similar promotion last year for another of its prizes, with a choose-your-own-entry-fee model.)

The book prize offers one thousand dollars and ten copies of the published book. The deadline for entry is August 31, and finalists will be announced in October, followed shortly thereafter by the winner selection.

Past winners for poetry include Katie Umans for Flock Book, Brad Ricca for American Mastodon, Jason Tandon for Give Over the Heckler and Everyone Gets Hurt, and Stefi Weisburd for The Wind Up Gods. For fiction, Yelizaveta P. Renfro won for A Catalogue of Everything in the World: Nebraska Stories, Fred McGavran for The Butterfly Collector, and Marcel Jolley for Neither Here Nor There.

More details on the prize history and how to enter online are available on the press's website.

Oregon-based High Desert Journal is accepting entries for its Obsidian Prize for poetry inspired by the West. All forms are accepted, from "free verse to haiku to cowboy," and the winning poet, selected by Paulann Petersen, will receive one thousand dollars and publication in the magazine.

Submissions are accepted only via Submishmash, and the entry fee for three poems totaling no more than one hundred lines is twelve dollars. The deadline is August 15.

The journal will administer a similar prize for fiction in the fall. The winner of last year's fiction prize was Joe Wilkins for "Enough of Me," selected by Gretel Ehrlich, which was published in the latest issue of High Desert Journal.

In the video below, poetry judge Paulann Petersen's poem "Replenish" is set to music by Portland, Oregon, ensemble Flash Choir.

The Poetry Center in Paterson, New Jersey, has announced the winner of the 2011 Paterson Fiction Prize, given annually for a novel or short story collection. Danielle Evans won the one-thousand-dollar prize for her short story collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead Books), which earlier this year was longlisted for the Story Prize and given an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award.

Evans's debut book takes its title from "The Bridge Poem" by Kate Rushin (The Black Back-Ups, Firebrand Books, 1993), whose meditation on the phenomenon of one group's "translating" their lives for the benefit of another group influenced the themes of Your Own Fool Self. "Right now we have a moment with a lot of language about post-racialism and yet a lot of evidence that we are clearly not post-anything," Evans told the Washington Post, "and there's a lot of room for complication, contradiction, and ambiguity, which is good territory for fiction."

Evans received the prize over fellow Iowa Writers' Workshop alumna (and current Workshop director) Lan Samantha Chang's All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost (W. W. Norton), Deborah Eisenberg's The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Picador), Patricia Engel's Vida (Black Cat), Lily King's Father of the Rain (Atlantic Monthly Press), Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered (Riverhead Books), and Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

In the video below, novelist Tayari Jones praises Evans's book. (And in the video here, the Washington Post's video book reviewer Ron Charles—who recently won an award of his own—takes on Evans's collection.)

The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the most lucrative honor of its kind at one hundred thousand euros (more than one hundred forty thousand dollars), was announced this afternoon. Irish-born author Colum McCann, who currently resides in New York City, won the 2011 award for his novel Let the Great World Spin (Random House, 2009).

The "genuinely twenty-first century novel that speaks to its time but is not enslaved by it" won the National Book Award in 2009. It was selected for the IMPAC Award from among more than one hundred sixty titles nominated by one hundred sixty-six libraries around the world.

Other finalists this year were Americans Barbara Kingsolver for The Lacuna, Yiyun Li for The Vagrants, Joyce Carol Oates for Little Bird of Heaven and Irish writers Colm Tóibín for Brooklyn and  William Trevor for Love and Summer. Also shortlisted are Michael Crummey of Canada for Galore and Australian writers David Malouf for Ransom, Craig Silvey for Jasper Jones, and Evie Wyld for After the Fire, a Still, Small Voice.

In the video below, McCann discusses his winning novel on a recent episode of City University of New York's video program City Talk.