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:
Poet Rajih al-Hamidani of Kuwait has won the television competition Million Dollar Poem. He received a prize of five million dirham (approximately $1.36 million) for a poem. Established seven years ago, the competition is hosted in Abu Dhabi and sponsored by the United Arab Emirates’s cultural authority. (Middle East Eye)
Meanwhile, Alexandra Alter reports on a number of Middle Eastern writers penning apocalyptic and futuristic stories in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, as the genre “captures the sense of despair that many writers say they feel in the face of cyclical violence and repression.” (New York Times)
British novelist David Mitchell has contributed a manuscript titled “From Me Flows What You Call Time” as the second text of the Future Library project. The text, which no one but Mitchell has seen, will not be published until 2114. Scottish artist Katie Paterson, who launched the project in 2014, plans to invite a different author to contribute a text each year until 2114; at that time, all one hundred manuscripts will be published. (Guardian)
At the New Yorker, fiction writer Rivka Galchen muses on how childhood reading includes more than just books, but also things like junk mail, advertising, and the sides of tea and cereal boxes.
Young adult author Julie Kagawa held the first-ever virtual-reality reading through the AltspaceVR app. Readers could join Kagawa’s avatar on the three-dimensional virtual-reality Dragon Island to listen to her reading and ask questions. (Publishers Weekly)
Stephanie Danler speaks with NPR about the restaurant business, writing sex scenes, and her debut novel that came out last week, Sweetbitter.
An original 1865 copy of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is expected to fetch between $2 million and $3 million at a Christie’s auction in June. (Washington Post)
Stephen Burt examines the “sad-birthday-to-me poem,” which has been penned by poets as disparate as Lord Byron and Hoa Nguyen. (Poetry Foundation)
