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.
The winners of the 2019 Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday. The recipients of the annual $15,000 awards for journalism and literature included Forrest Gander, for his poetry collection Be With; and Richard Powers, for his novel The Overstory. “If this prize has any meaning for me,” Powers told the Washington Post, “it’s not for this book alone but for a push among those literary writers who want to broaden our scope of concern from the personal and the domestic to the environmental and everything that lies beyond the world that we’ve created.” (Poets & Writers)
“Listen to these voices that are coming from the border. Listen to them, review them, extend your platforms to them.” Francisco Cantú on receiving a Los Angeles Times Book Award for his memoir, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border. Other winners include Nafissa Thompson-Spires and Rebecca Makkai. The awards ceremony, which was held in Los Angeles on Friday night, launched the city’s weeklong Festival of Books.
Yesterday a fire raged through Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral, burning the building’s roof and causing its central spiral to collapse. As France arranges to repair one of its most famous landmarks, Gillian Brockell remembers that the cathedral was rebuilt before, after Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame inspired a rescue operation almost as grand as the original construction. (Washington Post)
In London, Persephone Books is celebrating twenty years of publishing works by the last century’s overlooked female authors, including Winifred Watson’s novel Miss Pettigrew Lives for A Day. (New York Times)
More than one hundred and eighty thousand books went missing from Germany’s University of Bonn during and in the aftermath of World War II. Now over six hundred volumes have been returned to the university’s library. (Smithsonian)
At the New Yorker, Catherine Lacey talks about finding the “slimy place between dream and reality” in her story “Cut,” published in this week’s issue of the magazine.
While George R. R. Martin was initially worried about the HBO series Game of Thrones ending before he finished writing the books the show is based on, he now thinks the difference will be just enough for fans to have something to chew on. “They will all fight on the internet. And there will be debate. And—that’s fine.” (CBS)
And at Vulture, poet Claudia Rankine talks about Mo’Nique, the idea of white benevolence, and becoming a playwright.
