The Great Man Wins PEN/Faulkner

Kate Christensen has been awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. The award is a national prize which honors the best published works of fiction by American citizens in a calendar year.

The Washington Post breaks the story:

PEN/Faulkner judge Molly Giles called the novel “intelligent, consistently entertaining and original.” Fellow judge Victor LaValle called the women at its center “defiant, infuriating and alive.”

**(I guess that “alive” thing would be to contrast and compare with The Lovely Bones, where the central female character was not.)

The Post found Christensen in her laundry room:

“I’m really shocked,” said Christensen, 45, who was doing the laundry in her Brooklyn home when the phone call came. All writers know about the PEN/Faulkner Award, she said, but to her “it’s always seemed unattainable.”

Also in the running:

The Maytrees (HarperCollins) by Annie Dillard
The Indian Clerk (Bloomsbury USA) by David Leavitt
The Gateway: Stories (Southern Methodist University Press) by T.M. McNally
Chemistry and Other Stories (Picador) by Ron Rash

Last year, January ran a review of The Great Man by Tony Buchsbaum:

Christensen’s writing is luminous and enviably informed. I found things to love on every page. Using the telling detail, the thought, the gesture, she builds characters -- but even more impressive, she builds character. Reading about these people, you like them. You feel warmed by them, entertained by them. You can see yourself sitting down for dinner with them and delighted to say not one word for hours, listening to their every reminiscence.

You can read all of Buchsbaum’s review here.

** To avoid the confusion possible by introducing the idea of Alice Sebold’s wonderful 2003 novel here, I should say that The Lovely Bones was neither a winner of nor shortlisted for The PEN/Faulkner. (Frankly, there are people spinning at the mere whisper.) However, the book won the American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award for Adult Fiction in 2003.

Diaz and Danticat Take Home Prizes

Bloomberg boils the National Book Critics Award down so neatly, no more need be said:

Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead Books) won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, while Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying (Knopf) won for autobiography. Joyce Carol Oates, who was nominated in both categories, won no prizes.

The full piece is here.

Gwyn Awarded 2008 Charles Taylor Prize

Richard Gwyn has been awarded the seventh annual Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction for his book, John A.: The Man Who Made Us: The Life and Times of John A. Macdonald (Random House Canada). The prestigious $25,000.00 prize was awarded at a luncheon today in the Sovereign Ballroom of Toronto’s Le Royal Meridien King Edward Hotel.

The jury described the winning book as “a lively but thorough biography of John A. Macdonald up to the day of Confederation in 1867, Richard Gwyn brings to life the young Scottish-born lawyer who found himself unexpectedly entering politics in Kingston in 1844. Gwyn writes from a twenty-first century perspective while painting for his readers a vivid image of nineteenth century Canada: its society, customs, characters and politics. Gwyn helps us understand Macdonald’s genius and vision, which would shape the nation that grew to the north of the United States.”

The Globe & Mail felt that Gwyn’s win was “something of an anomaly for the Taylor prize. Since its creation in 2000, its juries, regardless of their composition, have tended to favour books of a personal, autobiographical or family nature, not works of historical biography or social history.” The single exception, The Globe noted was the late Carol Shields’ 2002 win Jane Austen: A Life.

Richard Gwyn is an award-winning author and journalist. He is the author of two previous biographies: The Unlikely Revolutionary, about Newfoundland premier Joey Smallwood and The Northern Magus about former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Also nominated:

• The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and Son by David Gilmour (Thomas Allen)
• From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People by Lorna Goodison (McClelland & Stewart)
• Lost Genius: The Story of a Forgotten Musical Maverick by Kevin Bassana (McClelland & Stewart)
• Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of Reszo Kasztner, Unknown Hero of the Holocaust by Anna Porter (Douglas & McIntyre)

Written a Poem, Mate?

Australian kids will want to start sharpening their pencils in time to submit their work to The Dorothea Mackellar Poetry Awards, “the oldest and largest poetry competition for school students in Australia.” According to the Web site:

The poetry awards aim to capture the imagination of students, inspiring them to express their thoughts creatively through poetry; while celebrating the legendary work of Dorothea Mackellar, author of the famous poem “My Country.” It is a unique national event, giving Australia’s young people a voice and an opportunity to strive for excellence in literature.

Barbara Guest, the awards program’s project manager, adds that the competition is “Australia’s biggest poetry writing event for school students, attracting more than 15,000 entries.”

The event is supported by the Australian government and is held in conjunction with National Literacy and Numeracy Week, September 1st to 7th.

The Web site for the Dorothea Mackellar Poetry Awards is very good and is stuffed with all the information you could possibly need to move forward with an entry, including resource notes for teachers and poetry writing tips for students.

2008 Newbery Honors Creative Librarian

This year’s Newbery Award-winning book, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village (Candlewick), began life a decade ago as a classroom project at the Park School of Baltimore, where librarian-turned-author Laura Amy Schlitz has been working since the early 1990s.

The Newbery Medal was founded in 1922 and is awarded for “best children’s book in the United States.” Previous Newbery winners include Louis Sachar’s Holes (1999), Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson (1978), Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1963), King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry (1949) and The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting (1923).

A complete list of Newbery-winning books is here.

Three Newbery honor books are chosen each year. In 2008 they are Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis (Scholastic), The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt (Clarion) and Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson (Putnam).

At the same time, the Randolph Caldecott award for top picture book went to Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Orson Scott Card won the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults while Mo Willems was awarded the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award for the most distinguished book for beginning readers for her There Is a Bird in Your Head!

The awards honor books for children published in the United States and were announced by the American Library Association, currently meeting in Philadelphia.

And the Winners Are...

The winners of the National Book Awards were announced last night in a ceremony in New York. Though there has already been much written about the event, it seemed to me that Sarah Weinman boiled it down most touchingly:

Like this year and last, I had a good time at the Book Awards. Why? Because even though the dress-up quotient was high and the speeches were long, I always feel a palpable love of literature in the room, even if it's not necessarily correlated to the nominated books.

Meanwhile, Edward Champion did a blow-by-blow throughout the evening.

The winners are as follows:

Fiction:

Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Also nominated:

Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Varieties of Disturbance, by Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris (Little, Brown & Company)
Like You’d Understand, Anyway, by Jim Shepard (Alfred A. Knopf)

Non-Fiction:

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner (Doubleday)

Also nominated:

Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat (Alfred A. Knopf)
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens (Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA)
Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, by Woody Holton (Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Ralph Ellison: A Biography, by Arnold Rampersad (Alfred A. Knopf)

Poetry:

Time and Materials, by Robert Hass (Ecco/HarperCollins)

Also nominated:

Magnetic North, by Linda Gregerson (Houghton Mifflin Company)
The House on Boulevard St., by David Kirby (Louisiana State University Press)
Old Heart, by Stanley Plumly (W.W. Norton & Company)
Messenger, by Ellen Bryant Voigt (W.W. Norton & Company)

Young People’s Literature:

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown & Company)

Also nominated:

Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One, by Kathleen Duey (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
Touching Snow, by M. Sindy Felin (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick (Scholastic Press)
Story of a Girl, by Sara Zarr (Little, Brown & Company)

Elizabeth Hay Wins Giller

Elizabeth Hay has won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s richest literary award. Here’s what Reuters reported that she said:

“I feel very lucky, so lucky in fact that I will probably be hit by a truck tomorrow so it is important that I say my thank-you’s now,” said Hay, who was previously nominated for the prize in 2000 for A Student of Weather.

Meanwhile, Ed Rants reports that Margaret Atwood and her husband, Graeme Gibson, “brought their own dinner in a box to the Giller Prize reception to protest a Four Seasons development that threatens the endangered Grenada dove. They said they could not accept food and drink from the Four Seasons, although they seemed to have no problem occupying the premises.”

(And it's a good thing Ed did mention it, because the article he pointed to at The Toronto Star has since vanished.)

Also nominated:

• Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje (McClelland & Stewart)
• A Secret Between Us, by Daniel Poliquin, translated by Donald Winkler (Douglas & McIntyre)
• The Assassin’s Song, by M.G. Vassanji (Doubleday Canada)
• Effigy, by Alissa York (Random House Canada)

January Magazine’s 2000 interview with Hay is here.

Shortlist Announcements Spike Sales

Around awards time, there’s always a swell of debate: do they or don’t they? Affect sales, that is. Canada’s Quill Blog brings some great news: at least in the case of the Giller Awards, they do:

According to just-released statistics from BookNet Canada, the shortlist announcement for the Scotiabank Giller Prize sparked a sales spike that averaged a 388% increase in weekly sales for the listed titles.

You can read the piece from Quill & Quire’s blog here.

“Bleak” and “Depressing” Novel Wins Man Booker

Irish novelist Anne Enright, 45, has been named the winner of the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for her novel The Gathering, published by Jonathan Cape.

Howard Davies, chair of judges, said the novel was both “bleak” and “depressing” going on to say it was a “very readable and satisfying novel.”

Enright didn’t disagree with the assessment, telling Radio 4’s Today that if they’re looking for a cheery read, “they shouldn’t really pick up my book … my book is the equivalent of a Hollywood weepie.”

Also nominated:

• Darkmans by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
• Animal’s People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)

Doris Lessing Awarded Nobel

Doris Lessing has been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. According to the Quill & Quire blog, Lessing is “only the 11th woman in the prize’s 106-year history” to be awarded this honor.

The New York Times does a great job of summarizing the 87-year-old writer’s amazing life thus far, while The Bookseller does an equally great job in giving it to us in tiny but important bites:

Lessing’s most famous novels include her début The Grass Is Singing (1950), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985) and Under My Skin (1994). She was born in Persia (now Iran) to British parents in 1919; she grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe); went to school in Salisbury; and moved to London in 1949, where she still lives.

Ed Champion wraps it all up even tighter (“A nice choice.”) with a collection of really terrific links, while asking, “Is Doris Lessing the first Nobel laureate with a MySpace page?” where Lessing herself asks, “Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.”

2007 NBA Shortlist Bound to Invite Controversy

The shortlists for the 2007 National Book Awards were announced today and include at least one title bound to bring the competition more press coverage than usual.

Within an hour of the announcement that Christopher Hitchens’ controversial bestseller God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything had been nominated in the non-fiction category, news agencies started filing stories that featured Hitchens’ inclusion. “Anti-religion book a nominee for National Book Awards,” CBC News told its readers.

Overall, the 2007 shortlist seems to represent a larger than usual percentage of books that many readers will find accessible: and might even find on their shelves including Time and Materials, former US Poet Laureate Robert Hass’ first collection in 10 years; The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie; Jim Shepard’s collection of stories, Like You’d Understand, Anyway; Edwidge Danticat’s memoir, Brother, I'm Dying; Arnold Rampersad’s biography of Ralph Ellison and Legacy of Ashes, Tim Weiner’s history of the CIA.

2007’s very tough field will be narrowed down on November 14th at a benefit dinner and ceremony in Manhattan to be hosted by writer, humorist and best dressed list hall of famer Fran Lebowitz. The winner in each category will receive $10,000 plus a bronze
statue while each finalist has received a bronze medal and a $1,000 cash award. That evening Joan Didion and Terry Gross will receive special awards: Didion will receive the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and Gross for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

There are several events planned leading up to the festivities on November 14th. You can read about them here.

Here’s the full list of finalists for the 2007 National Book Awards:

Fiction:
Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Varieties of Disturbance, by Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris (Little, Brown & Company)
Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Like You’d Understand, Anyway, by Jim Shepard (Alfred A. Knopf)

Nonfiction:
Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat (Alfred A. Knopf)
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens (Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA)
Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, by Woody Holton (Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Ralph Ellison: A Biography, by Arnold Rampersad (Alfred A. Knopf)
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner (Doubleday)

Poetry:
Magnetic North, by Linda Gregerson (Houghton Mifflin Company)
Time and Materials, by Robert Hass (Ecco/HarperCollins)
The House on Boulevard St., by David Kirby (Louisiana State University Press)
Old Heart, by Stanley Plumly (W.W. Norton & Company)
Messenger, by Ellen Bryant Voigt (W.W. Norton & Company)

Young People’s Literature:
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown & Company)
Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One, by Kathleen Duey (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
Touching Snow, by M. Sindy Felin (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick (Scholastic Press)
Story of a Girl, by Sara Zarr (Little, Brown & Company)

Giller Prize Longlist Announced

The longlist for the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Awards was announced yesterday. This narrows the field to 15 from the 108 books submitted for consideration. The Scotiabank Giller was named in honour of the late literary journalist Doris Giller. It was founded in 1994 by her husband, Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch, and is Canada’s richest literary prize: it awards $40,000 annually to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English and $2,500 to each of the finalists.

The shortlist for this year’s Giller Prize will be announced on October 9th with the winner to be awarded in a televised black-tie ceremony on November 6th.

The 2007 Scotiabank Giller longlist is:

• Soucouyant, by David Chariandy (Arsenal Pulp Press)
• Zero Gravity, by Sharon English (The Porcupine’s Quill)
• Helpless, by Barbara Gowdy (HarperCollins Canada)
• Late Nights on Air, by Elizabeth Hay (McClelland & Stewart)
• The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill (HarperCollins Canada)
• Stormy Weather, by Paulette Jiles (HarperCollins Canada)
• Lauchlin of the Bad Heart, by D.R. MacDonald (HarperCollins Canada)
• The Reckoning of Boston Jim, by Claire Mulligan (Brindle & Glass)
• Conceit, by Mary Novik (Doubleday Canada)
• Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje (McClelland & Stewart)
• A Secret Between Us, by Daniel Poliquin, translated by Donald Winkler (Douglas & McIntyre)
• The Assassin’s Song, by M.G. Vassanji (Doubleday Canada)
• The Architects Are Here, by Michael Winter (Penguin Books Canada)
• October, by Richard Wright (HarperCollins Canada)
• Effigy, by Alissa York (Random House Canada)

Feathering Their Nests

Although they aren’t exactly the Pulitzer Prizes, the annual Quill Book Awards have managed to gain something of a popular following, primarily because their presentation is televised in America.

There are 19 Quill categories, with the winners in each reportedly chosen by “more than 6,000 booksellers and librarians” on behalf of the Quill Foundation, a group of media organizations promoting literacy. Among this year’s victors, announced last night, are: The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield (Debut Author); The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (General Fiction); The Assault on Reason, by Al Gore (History/Current Events/Politics); What the Dead Know, by Laura Lippman (Mystery/Suspense/Thriller); and Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson (Biography/Memoir). The full list can be found here.

Winners will be presented with their prizes during a “gala awards ceremony” to be held on October 22 at New York City’s Lincoln Center, hosted by NBC Today show personalities Ann Curry and Al Roker. That ceremony will be televised by NBC stations on the night of Saturday, October 27.

In the meantime, readers are invited to cast their votes for which book among these 19 winners that they think deserves also to be named “The Book of the Year.” Register your choice here. Voting will close on October 10.

* * *

Speaking of literary commendations, California author Joan Didion, best known of recent date for having written the painful book-length essay The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), is to be given a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters during the National Book Awards ceremony on November 14. During those same festivities, Terry Gross, executive producer and host of National Public Radio’s Fresh Air program, will receive the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

These announcements come well in advance of the lists of finalists in four National Book Award categories -- fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people’s literature. Those selections won’t be made public until October 10.

Man Booker Shortlist Announced ... and a Consolation

The shortlist for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction was announced at a press conference in London yesterday. When the dust cleared, six contenders were left standing:

• Darkmans by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)
• The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
• Animal’s People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)

The Guardian does a superb job of running down the final six (even if they get a little snarkey at times). Also from The Guardian:

Speaking after the event, this year’s chair of the judges, Howard Davies, admitted that choosing a shortlist from what was widely regarded as an adventurous and intriguing longlist had been tough. “We hope,” he said, “that the choices we have made after passionate and careful consideration will attract wide interest.”

Meanwhile, Michael Redhill, one of the longlisted authors, walked away with the 2007 Toronto Book Award a couple of days ago. Redhill won with what turns out to be his ironically titled novel, Consolation. It’s not a bad consolation, either. Redhill will receive about $11,000 along with one of the most prestigious book awards in Canada. And Redhill was in tough company, including the winner of the 2006 Governor General’s Award, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam. Here’s what the 2007 Toronto Book Award shortlist looked like:

• Inside Toronto: Urban Interiors 1880s to 1920s by Sally Gibson (Cormorant Book)
• Toronto by Geoffrey James (Douglas & McIntyre)
• Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam (Doubleday Canada)
• Consolation by Michael Redhill (Doubleday Canada)
• Uptown Downtown by Raymond Souster (The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box)

QBP Announces Winners

The Quality Paperback Book Club has announced the winners of its New Voices and New Visions Awards.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, a novel by Marisha Pessl, has received the New Voices award for an outstanding work of fiction by a debut author. The New Visions Award has gone to The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.

The New Voices Award was launched in 1984, while the New Visions Award was first given in 1990. Each award brings their authors a $5000 prize but, according to Gary Jansen, QPC’s executive editor, the award program’s role in supporting and highlighting the authors they work with is just as important. “We realize that the vitality of the Club is dependent on nurturing new authors as well as vigorously supporting the achievements of those authors with established careers,” says Jansen. “These awards are QPB’s way of celebrating outstanding literary achievements that have deeply affected both our editors and our readers.”

The Word from L.A.

From all accounts, the 2007 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books was an even bigger success than usual. And that’s saying something. As the L.A. Times reported after the first day of festivities, “LA Times Book Fest Day 1: Shorter Lines + More Food = More Fun.” According to the piece, the food was remarkable. “If there weren't so many book booths and authors running about, we'd think this was a cooking festival.”

Fun and food aside, one of the highlights of the event was the presentation of the prestigious Los Angeles Times Book Awards, held at Royce Hall (also the location of the best secret bathroom find, but that’s from the other story) on Friday night.

The winners are as follows:

Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement:
William Kittredge

Fiction:
A Woman in Jerusalem, by A.B. Yehoshua, translated by Hillel Halkin (Harcourt)

Biography:
Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, by Neal Gabler (Alfred A. Knopf)

History:
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright (Knopf)

Current Interest:
Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, by Ian Buruma (Penguin)

Mystery/Thriller:
Echo Park, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)

Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction:
White Ghost Girls, by Alice Greenway (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic).

Young Adult Fiction:
Tyrell, by Coe Booth (Push/Scholastic)

Science and Technology:
In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, by Eric R. Kandel (W.W. Norton)

Poetry:
Ooga-Booga, by Frederick Seidel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Each prize included a $1,000 cash award.

Who Said Short Fiction Doesn’t Pay?

Julian Gough has been announced as the winner of this year’s National Short Story Prize, with David Almond named as runner-up. Julian Gough will receive £15,000 -- the largest award in the world for a single short story -- for “The Orphan and the Mob.” Almond will see £3,000 for “Slog's Dad.” The three remaining authors on the shortlist -- Jonathan Falla, Jackie Kay and Hanif Kureishi -- will each receive £500.

Announcing the winners, Chair of the judges, broadcaster and writer Mark Lawson, said that “from a shortlist which included an impressive range of subjects, settings and styles, the judges were unanimous in awarding the first prize to Julian Gough. The comedy, energy and originality of both plot and voice set him ahead of the other contenders. David Almond was a very strong runner-up for the accuracy of his dialogue and psychology in a story which managed the difficult task of combining reality and fantasy.”

You can read full details here.

2007 Orange Broadband Shortlist Announced

The shortlist for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction has been announced:

• Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk
• The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
• A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo
• The Observations by Jane Harris
• Digging to America by Anne Tyler

The winner will be announced June 6. The shortlist is here.

2007 Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced

• Fiction: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• General Non-fiction: The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
• Biography: The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher by Debby Applegate
• History: The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff
• Poetry: Native Guard by Natasha Tretheway
• Drama: Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire

A complete rundown of prize-winners (both books and news media) can be found here.

READ MORE: “Great Books the Pulitzers Overlooked,” by Mark Oppenheimer (The Huffington Post).

Philip Roth Named Winner of First Saul Bellow Award

Philip Roth has been named the winner of the first ever PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, “a $40,000 prize named for the late Nobel laureate and one of Roth’s closest friends and literary heroes,” says AP.

The new award was created in cooperation with the Bellow estate and was made possible by a grant from author and philanthropist Evelyn Stefansson Nef. The PEN/Saul Bellow Award will be awarded every two years.

Roth might well be one of the most awarded authors of his generation. He has received the PEN/Faulkner Award three times (for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain and Everyman) and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (for American Pastoral).

Fans of this prolific author don’t have long to wait for a new novel. Exit Ghost is expected in October of this year. Answers.com says that the book will be the last one to feature the Nathan Zuckerman character.

You can read the AP item here.

Don’t Judge a Blook by Its ... er... Cover

Where many writers -- yours truly included -- keep personal blogs in part to let readers of their books sneak a peek inside the author’s skull, increasingly things are working the other way around: where the ramblings inside a human skull are given air on a blog that eventually -- and one way or another -- ends up being available in book form.

Author Cory Doctorow even thinks that writing that begins in blog form can alter the creative process. “Previously, such jottings might have been kept in the author’s notebook,” Doctorow told the BBC, “but something amazing happens when you post them online: readers help you connect them, flesh them out and grow them into fully fledged books or blooks.”

When you have a trend that flows towards being something like movement, after a while you end up with an awards program. Enter the Lulu Blooker, “the world’s first literary prize devoted to ‘blooks’ -- books based on blogs or other websites, including webcomics.”

The $15,000 Blooker Prize is sponsored by Lulu, a POD company. Though, when you think about it, it’s likely not that much of a reach. After all, since Technorati estimates that 175,000 new blogs are fired up each day, it stands to reason that not every single book-destined blog will find publisher support. It might make sense for self-styled self-publishing experts, Lulu, to stay in the center of the books-to-blogs soup. Although, according to the BBC, last year’s Blooker winner blook, Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, “has now sold over 100,000 copies and is being made into a film.”

Here’s the shortlist for the 2007 Lulu Blooker Awards.

Non-Fiction:

• Crashing The Gate by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas (Chelsea Green)
• My Secret: A PostSecret Book by Frank Warren (Regan/HarperCollins)
• My War: Killing Time In Iraq by Colby Buzzell (Berkeley/Penguin)
• Small Is the New Big: and 183 other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas by Seth Godin (Portfolio/Penguin) by Kristin Espinasse (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster)
• So Close: Infertile and Addicted To Hope by Tertia Albertyn (Oshun)
• Words in a French Life: Lessons in Love and Language From the South of France by Kristin Espinasse (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster)

Fiction:

• Albert the Third by Slim Palmer (Exposure Publishing)
• BreakupBabe: A Novel by Rebecca Agiewich (Ballantine)
• The Doorbells of Florence by Andrew Losowsky (Prandial Publishing/Lulu)
• Messages from the Lost Continent conceived and edited by Horst Prillinger (Books on Demand GmbH)
• Methuselah’s Daughter by J. A. Eddy and Dean Esmay (Lulu)
• Monster Island: A Zombie Novel by David Wellington (Thunder's Mouth Press/Avalon)

Comics:

• Born of Nifty: Sluggy Freelance Megatome 01 by Pete Abrams (Sluggy Freelance)
• The Definition of Awesome: Another Joe and Monkey Collection by Zach Miller (Boxcar Comics/Lulu)
• Mom’s Cancer by Brian Fies (Abrams Image)

Hunting for an Envelope

While trying to find an explanation of the Planeta Award for Pedro Blas Gonzalez’s review of The Albanian Affairs, I came across the list of literary awards on Wikipedia.

Now I’m not going to get into a discussion on the usefulness -- or otherwise -- of this resource. This isn’t the time or the place. No debating, for instance, the merits of an unsupervised collective contributing to a megalithic resource that is international -- and unparalleled -- in scope. Whatever the case, this list is the best of one of its kind that I’ve seen. And if you’ve seen better, please let me know so I can share it with our readers.

Meanwhile, here’s the link.

Kiriyama Shortlist Announced

The shortlist for the 2007 Kiriyama Prize has been announced. One winner each from fiction and non-fiction will be selected to share the $30,000 prize. In 2007, shortlisted writers hail from Canada, China, India, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Though eligible writers can be from anywhere in the world, books that are considered for the prize must be available in English and published in the United States or Canada. The goal of the Kiriyama Prize is to annually recognize and award outstanding books that promote greater understanding of and among the nations of the Pacific Rim and of South Asia.

The 2007 Kiriyama Prize finalists are:

Non-Fiction

• The Haiku Apprentice by Abigail Friedman (Stone Bridge Press)
• Blonde Indian: An Alaska Native Memoir by Ernestine Hayes (University of Arizona Press)
• Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin (Viking)
• Tigers in Red Weather: A Quest for the Last Wild Tigers by Ruth Padel (Walker & Company)
• Chinese Lessons: An American, His Classmates, and the Story of the New China by John Pomfret (Henry Holt)

Fiction

• The Inheritance of Loss by Kirin Desai (Grove Atlantic)
• Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami (Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin translators) (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Stick Out Your Tongue by Ma Jian (Flora Drew translator) (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Certainty by Madeleine Thien (McClelland & Stewart, Canada; Little, Brown, USA)
• Behold the Many by Lois-Ann Yamanaka (Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Picador)

The finalists will be announced in late March.

Three Authors Awarded Order of Canada

Authors Howard Engel, Barbara Gowdy and Frances Itani are among the 55 new members to the Order of Canada which, according to CBC Arts, “was established in 1967 to honour Canadians whose extraordinary achievements or outstanding service in various fields have made a difference across the country.” Says the CBC:

The latest inductees will receive their insignia from the Governor General at a Rideau Hall ceremony later this year.

Any Canadian may be nominated for the Order of Canada, while non-Canadians may be considered for honorary appointments. The appointments are made on the recommendation of an advisory council chaired by the chief justice of Canada.