Jump to navigation Skip to content
Author Wells Tower writes of trailing Mitt Romney on his presidential campaign; New York City's Bowery Poetry Club has closed; Tin House editor Rob Spillman recounts serving on a Federal Grand Jury for Homicides; and other news.
David Orr details the poetry of parenthood; Rachel Syme on the legacy of novelist Dawn Powell, whose diaries, recently up for auction, did not find a buyer; Jason Diamond reveals F. Scott Fitzgerald's first love, the real life Daisy Buchanan; and other news.
This past May it was announced that the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction would no longer be sponsored by its longtime partner, the telecommunications company Orange. Over the weekend, the prize’s cofounder and honorary director, novelist Kate Mosse, announced that a new sponsor for the prize would soon be selected.
Since news broke of the partnership’s end, eighteen different companies have expressed interest in taking over sponsorship of the new Prize for Fiction. “It’s been incredibly exciting,” Mosse said at a conference in England on Saturday. “We’ll be making a choice in the next week and announcing in September.”
Orange has sponsored the U.K.-based prize—which annually awards thirty thousand pounds (approximately forty-seven thousand dollars) to a woman writer for a novel written in English—since it was founded in 1996. Of the former sponsor Mosse said, “Our partnership has delivered everything—and more—than we hoped for. A celebration of international writing by women, one of the most significant arts awards in the U.K., and also a major force in education, literacy, and research.”
Madeline Miller won the 2012 prize for her novel The Song of Achilles (Ecco, 2011). The finalists were Esi Edugyan, Anne Enright, Georgia Harding, Cynthia Ozick, and Ann Patchett. Previous winners of the prize have included Téa Obreht for The Tiger's Wife (Random House, 2011) and Zadie Smith for On Beauty (Penguin, 2005).
In the video below, Madeline Miller discusses her winning novel.
A student in the United Kingdom discovered four forgotten stories by Katherine Mansfield; entertainment moguls Barry Diller and Scott Rudin are considering creating an e-book business; Wired takes a hard look at the life of the late Steve Jobs; and other news.
According to a joint report from the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group, sales from e-books more than doubled from 2010 to 2011; education company Pearson announced today it will purchase self-publisher Author Solutions for over one hundred million dollars; Knopf reports sales of Cheryl Strayed's Wild have tripled since Oprah Winfrey announced the revival of her book club; and other news.
The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University in Belfast has announced the winner of the third annual Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry.
Rachael Boast of Scotland won the 2012 prize for her collection, Sidereal (Picador, 2011). She will receive £1,000 (approximately $1,570) and an all-expenses-paid trip to give a reading at New York University during the first annual Thomas Quinlan Lecture in Poetry on October 18.
The award, which is funded by the Glucksman Ireland House and Center for Irish and Irish-American Studies at NYU, is given annually to a writer for a first collection of poetry published in the United Kingdom or Ireland in the previous year. The prize was established in celebration of the work of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, and in honor of its founding poet. The Seamus Heaney Centre "is a focal point for creativity in Ireland and is recognized as an international centre of creative and research excellence in the field of literature," the mission on the website states. "Central to the Centre’s ethos is the encouragement of emerging talent."
Frank Ormsby, poet and co-editor of the The Yellow Nib, the Seamus Heaney Centre's literary journal, served as chairman of the judges for the 2012 prize. Of the winning collection Ormsby says: "The resonant, robust lyrics and sequences in this beguiling collection are subtly weighted and consistently engaging. The world they create is affecting in its intensity and vibrant in its forms and images, drawing the reader in time after time. This is poetry that sets up 'so bright a mirror/the room moves towards it.”’
In a 2011 interview with the Exeter Poetry Festival in Exeter, England, Boast discusses her collection. “Overall,” she says, “it’s a book about time, cycles of time; structures which are vaster than we are and how we fit into them.”
GalleyCat advises writers on using SoundCloud; Chen Guangcheng, the blind dissident who escaped house arrest in China, will publish a memoir with Henry Holt; Maria Bustillos explains how George Orwell taught her what to read next; and other news.
The founding editor of Oxford American magazine, Marc Smirnoff, and its long-time managing editor, Carol Ann Fitzgerald, are no longer associated with the publication; author Walter Kirn details his personal history with Mormonism; designer Dinah Fried has created famous literary meals from the pages of Salinger, Melville, and others, and other news.
Last week, the Hurston/Wright Foundation announced the nominees for the eleventh annual Legacy Awards, given to writers of African descent for books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction published in the previous year.
The 2012 nominees in poetry are Aracelis Girmay for Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions), Evie Shockley for The New Black (Wesleyan University Press), and Tracy K. Smith for Life on Mars (Graywolf).
The nominees in fiction are Nuruddin Farah for Crossbones (Riverhead), Tayari Jones for Silver Sparrow (Algonquin Books), Helen Oyeyemi for Mr. Fox (Riverhead), Danzy Senna for You Are Free (Riverhead), Jesmyn Ward for Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury), and Colson Whitehead for Zone One (Doubleday).
The nominees in nonfiction are Tomiko Brown-Nagin for Courage to Dissent (Oxford University Press), Melissa V. Harris-Perry for Sister Citizen (Yale University Press), Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts for Harlem is Nowhere (Little, Brown), Binyavanga Wainaina for One Day I Will Write About This Place (Graywolf), and Mark Whitaker for My Long Trip Home (Simon & Schuster).
The winners will be announced later this fall and honored at the annual Legacy Award ceremony on December 1 in Washington, D.C.
The Bowie, Maryland-based Hurston/Wright Foundation—named for writers Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright—is a national resource center for writers, readers, and supporters of African American literature. Founded in 1990, the Foundation’s mission is to “discover, develop, and honor Black writers” at every stage of their writing career. In addition to the Legacy Award, the foundation offers a variety of literary programming, including awards, workshops, and residencies for African American high school and college students, and awards for businesses, educators, and community leaders that have demonstrated a commitment to African American literature.
The foundation’s board of directors and advisory board are comprised of writers and other members of the literary community, including Chinua Achebe, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Terry McMillan, Toni Morrison, and E. Ethelbert Miller.
Michelle Dean considers the unpublished erotica of Edith Wharton; the former publisher of McSweeney's has created a mobile app that will deliver a geo-located story; the California Repertory Company intends to mount a production of the work of the poet Charles Bukowski and composer Stephen Sondheim; and other news.
