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Spain's culture minister, César Antonio Molina, announced last week that seventy-five-year-old Spanish novelist Juan Marsé has won the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s highest literary honor. Considered by some to be on the level of the Nobel Prize, the award comes with a cash stipend of 125,000 euros ($160,000).
At a ceremony in London on Tuesday night, Rachel Johnson, the sister of the city's mayor, Boris Johnson, was awarded the sixteenth annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award for passages in her novel Shire Hell (Penguin, 2008). John Updike received a lifetime achievement award after being nominated for the prize four consecutive times.
Iowa City was recently named a City of Literature by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). With a population of less than seventy thousand people, Iowa City is the third city to receive the distinction, following Edinburgh, Scotland, and Melbourne, Australia.
Borders recently announced that nominees for the 2008 Original Voices Awards. The annual prizes recognize "fresh, compelling, and ambitious works from the new and emerging talents" published in the past year.
In the midst of an economic downturn and a crunched credit market, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt recently requested that its editors stop acquiring books.
Last Friday the Lannan Foundation announced that poet August Kleinzahler won this year’s $150,000 Literary Award. Lannan Fellowships, each worth $100,000, were also awarded to poets Katie Ford and Ilya Kaminsky and fiction writers Charles D’Ambrosio and Glenn Patterson.
As of December 31, Random House, the largest trade publisher in the United States, will freeze the pension plan funds of its current employees, and will eliminate the plan as a benefit for new hires.
Last night the National Book Foundation announced the winners of the 2008 National Book Awards at a ceremony in New York City.
Two states last week announced the appointments of new poets laureate. Marilyn Taylor was named Wisconsin’s poet laureate by Governor Jim Doyle. In California, the honor was given to Carol Muske-Dukes by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Each will serve as poet laureate for a two-year term.
On Monday evening the National Book Foundation kicked off National Book Awards week in lower Manhattan with their annual 5 Under 35 celebration. Five young fiction writers, each selected by a former National Book Award winner or finalist, shared the podium to show an audience of peers and admirers—and a few critics—what American fiction has in store.
