Jump to navigation Skip to content
Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of The Great Gatsby will open the Cannes Film Festival; Random House announced new terms for its new genre imprint author contracts; a roundup of AWP 2013 recaps from conference veterans Steve Almond, Roxane Gay, and Julianna Baggott; and other news.
Helen Zell will give fifty million dollars to the writing program at the University of Michigan; Siddhartha Mitter reports from the Congo Literary Festival; the Telegraph ranks the worst sex scenes in contemporary literature; and other news.
Barnes & Noble announced a major expansion of its NOOK Video offerings; the Wall Street Journal reports Disney-owned Hyperion is selling off its backlist to focus on publishing titles that promote its ABC television properties; Zainab Bahrani details the struggle to save the National Library of Iraq from oblivion; and other news.
Peabody Award-winning journalist Nate Thayer reports the Atlantic offered to publish one of his essays—for free; Julian Barnes claims authors are driven by market forces to write about sex; Coffee House Press announced it's expanding its catalog to include books of essays and creative nonfiction; and other news.
The VIDA count for 2012 has been published, which spotlights gender disparity among publications; Paul Ford considers Amazon's foggy corporate culture; LynDee Walker shares unconventional tips on dealing with rejection; and other news.
The recipients of the inaugural Windham Campbell Prizes in fiction, nonfiction, and drama were announced this morning at Yale University. Each of the nine winners of the new prize will receive $150,000 to support their writing.
The winners in fiction are Tom McCarthy, James Salter, and Zoë Wicomb; the winners in nonfiction are Adina Hoffman, Jonny Steinberg, and Jeremy Scahill; the winners in drama are Naomi Wallace, Steven Adly Guirgis, and Tarell Alvin McCraney.
Sponsored by Yale and established with a gift from the estate of the late writer Donald Windham, the Windham Campbell Literature Prizes recognize English-language writers at all stages of their careers. The prizes are named in honor of Windham and his longtime partner, the journalist and publisher Sandy M. Campbell. The prizes are administered by the Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, which also houses Windham’s papers. The awards join a list of esteemed literary prizes already sponsored by Yale, including the Bollingen Prize for Poetry and the Yale Series of Younger Poets.
“Yale is a place that hopes to inspire and recognize greatness in every field,” said Peter Salovey, president-elect of Yale University, in a press release. “The Windham Campbell Prizes allow us to fulfill that ambition in the field of world literature in ways we are only beginning to understand.”
There is no application process for the Windham Campbell Prizes. Established professionals in each category are asked to nominate names for consideration, and a selection committee meets at Yale to name up to nine writers to receive prizes.
The winners of the inaugural prizes will receive their awards at a ceremony at Yale during the Windham Campbell Literary Festival from September 10 to September 13 in New Haven.
“I look forward to the dialogue the winners will inspire on the Yale campus and around the world,” Salovey said. “We will learn much from our prize-winners, particularly in these first years of awarding the prize.”
In the video below, Salovey announces the prize and the first annual winners.
"Man is a mass of electrified clay!" Percy Shelley wrote a couple hundred years ago. Frances Ashcroft and Denis Noble, professors at the University of Oxford, discuss the science of how ions transmit electricity through the body as well as the more poetic aspects of electricity, including Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, Mary Shelley's inspiration for Frankenstein, and more.
Amazon is reportedly looking to rent half-a-million square feet of office space in New York City; nineteen Charles Bukowski drawings were rediscovered at a book fair; Jillian Goodman considers Michelle Orange’s This is Running for Your Life; and other news.
With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Denise Duhamel’s Blowout and Phillip Lopate’s Portrait Inside My Head, as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.
