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.
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi has won the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her second novel, Call Me Zebra. The $15,000 prize will presented on Saturday at the PEN/Faulkner Awards ceremony in Washington, D.C. (Washington Post)
The Women’s Prize for Fiction has announced the shortlist for this year’s award. The novels nominated for the £30,000 international prize are The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker; My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite; Milkman by Anna Burns; Ordinary People by Diana Evans; An American Marriage by Tayari Jones; and Circe by Madeline Miller.
Independent press Tin House Books has named Craig Popelars its new publisher as of June 1. Popelars joins Tin House after twenty-five years at Algonquin Books, where he was associate publisher. (Shelf Awareness)
During Saturday’s Independent Bookstore Day festivities, a reading by author Jonathan Metzl at the flagship Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C., was interrupted by a group of white supremacists who marched through the store shouting the name of a hate group associated with the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. (Publishers Weekly)
Following social media controversy in January, Amélie Wen Zhao cancelled the publication of her debut book, Blood Heir. Now Zhao has reconsidered, and the young adult novel, which many criticized for its depiction of slavery, is scheduled for release with Delacorte Press in November. (New York Times)
The Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, has named Mats Malm its new permanent secretary. Malm, a professor of literary theory at the University of Gothenburg, will take over from Anders Olsson, who has been leading the Academy since the sexual misconduct scandal and series of resignations that rocked the institution in 2018. (France 24)
In Abram, Texas, writers from across the state gathered on Sunday to protest the impending border wall construction. The writers assembled in front of a nine-hundred-year-old cypress that will be enclosed in an inaccessible no-man’s-land if the wall is completed. (Monitor)
“I wish our books, as art objects, had better ways of showing more of the practice and work and failure that go into making them.” Geffrey Davis speaks to Poets & Writers about his second poetry collection, Night Angler, released today from BOA Editions.
