Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:
“Poetry, though, is a door that only continues to open. Even the unchangeable past changes inside a poem.” In an interview with SF Gate, poet Jane Hirshfield discusses art’s permanence, the influence of the natural world, and her two books coming out this month from Knopf: The Beauty: Poems and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World.
Last night in New York City, the winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced. Claudia Rankine won the poetry award for Citizen: An American Lyric, Marilynne Robinson won the fiction award for Lila, and Roz Chast won the autobiography award for Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? For more details and a complete list of winners in all six categories, read the G&A Blog.
Speaking of Roz Chast, National Poetry Month begins April 1, and Chast designed this year’s official poster for the Academy of American Poets.
“The greatest problem for Sappho studies is that there’s so little Sappho to study. It would be hard to think of another poet whose status is so disproportionate to the size of her surviving body of work.” After three millennia, the poet Sappho continues to fascinate and frustrate writers and scholars alike, especially when it comes to her biography. (New Yorker)
At the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks wonders, “Can a writer’s original inspiration survive success?”
Neel Mukherjee, whose novel The Lives of Others was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, details the importance, vastness, and innovation of the Murty Classical Library of India, a project that is “possibly one of the most complex in the realm of scholarly publication.”
Less than twenty-four hours after fantasy author Terry Pratchett passed away, more than 1,600 people have donated over £28,000 to the Alzheimer’s charity The Research Institute for the Care of Older People. Pratchett, who died yesterday at the age of sixty-six, was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in 2007. (Guardian)
Author of the acclaimed debut novel-in-stories Making Nice Matt Sumell shares his thoughts with Publishers Weekly about the often-excruciating writing process, and the necessity of pushing through the pain to achieve success.
