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:
Belarusian novelist and investigative journalist Svetlana Alexievich has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for her “polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” Alexievich may be best known in the U.S. for her 2005 nonfiction work Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of the Nuclear Disaster, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Read more at the Grants & Awards Blog.
“Literary biography is a tricky genre, and not made more straightforward by slicing it into year-long tranches.” Germaine Greer reviews James Shapiro’s new book 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear, noting the challenges of writing literary biographies, as evidence and facts are often missing. (New Statesman)
Writers Zoë Heller and Siddhartha Deb discuss how authors reputations shapes our reading of their work. “How will we find either rhetoric or poetry unless we are ready to test books for ourselves, to see if the writers we disagree with, those who came up with the wrong answers, at least struggled with the right questions? That can be determined only by the work, not by the reputation.” (New York Times)
At Vulture, Paris Review editor Lorin Stein discusses the process of translating one particularly difficult sentence of Michel Houllebecq’s novel Submission into English. Stein’s translation of Submission will be published on October 20 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
“I write whatever I’m inclined to write, because a writer shouldn’t outguess or in any way condescend to her audience” Award-winning author Ann Beattie talks about her writing process and her new story collection, The State We’re In: Maine Stories, out now from Scibner. A profile of Beattie is featured in the September/October 2015 issue of Poets & Writers. (Millions)
Here’s one version of a “graphic novel” project. Author and photographer Rachel Hulin is releasing her new novel in posts on Instagram. Over the next nine months, Hulin will post excerpts of her two-hundred-page novel, Hey Harry Hey Matilda, along with corresponding photographs. The project is similar to “Twitter fiction,” but without the 140-character constraint. (Yahoo News, Atlantic)
It’s National Poetry Day in the U.K., but people across the globe are encouraged to participate in poetic celebrations. National Poetry Day Founder William Seighart notes the importance of poetry in the public sphere: “Poetry seems to have a unique ability to help people understand each other as people, not as headlines or statistics.” (BBC Arts)
