Jacqueline Woodson Named Young People’s Poet Laureate

The Poetry Foundation names a Young People’s Poet Laureate every two years. In 2015, the $25,000 laureate title has been awarded to Jacqueline Woodson.

“Jacqueline Woodson is an elegant, daring, and restlessly innovative,” says Poetry Foundation president Robert Polito.“So many writers settle on a style and a repertoire of gestures and subjects, but Woodson, like her characters, is always in motion and always discovering something fresh. As she once told an interviewer, ‘If you have no road map, you have to create your own.’ Her gifts, adventurousness and generosity, suggest she will be a terrific young people’s poet laureate.”

Woodson was born in Columbus, Ohio, and grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, and Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of more than 30 books for children and young adults, including From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun (1995), which was named a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and won a Jane Addams Children’s Book Award; Miracle’s Boys (2000), which won the 2001 Coretta Scott King Award and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Hush (2002), a National Book Award finalist; Locomotion (2003), also a National Book Award finalist; Coming on Home Soon (2004), a Caldecott Honor Book and a Booklist Editors’ Choice; and Behind You (2004), included in the New York Public Library’s list of best Books of the Teen Age. Three of Woodson’s books have been named Newbery Honor Books: Show Way (2005), Feathers (2007), and After Tupac & D Foster (2008). Her recent books include the young adult novel Beneath a Meth Moon (2012) and Brown Girl Dreaming (2014), a novel in verse about Woodson’s family and segregation in the South, which won a National Book Award and was named a Newbery Honor Book.

In an op-ed for the New York Times, Woodson described how she wrote the book: “As I interviewed relatives in both Ohio and Greenville, S.C., I began to piece together the story of my mother’s life, my grandparents’ lives and the lives of cousins, aunts and uncles. These stories, and the stories I had heard throughout my childhood, were told with the hope that I would carry on this family history and American history, so that those coming after me could walk through the world as armed as I am.”

Woodson was awarded a Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults, a St. Katharine Drexel Award, and an Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers’ Literature. Jonathan Demme is adapting Beneath a Meth Moon for the screen. Woodson currently lives in Brooklyn with her family.

“Woodson’s lyrical, deeply empathetic work is enthralling to all readers, making her the ideal ambassador for young people’s literature,” said Katherine Litwin, Poetry Foundation library director. “We couldn’t be more honored and excited to have her join us for the next two years in this important role.”

In recognition of Woodson’s achievements, the Poetry Foundation’s web site is featuring her in a Poetry off the Shelf podcast and an interview.

IMPAC Dublin Shortlist Announced

Libraries around the world have put forward nominations for the 2015 IMPAC Dublin Award. In total 142 books have been longlisted for the $100,000 international award including 37 from the United States, 19 fro, the UK, 9 from Canada.

2015 nominees include Kate Atkinson (Life After Life), Margaret Atwood (MaddAddam), Charles Belfoure (The Paris Architect), Joseph Boyden (The Orenda), J.M. Coetzee (The Childhood of Jesus), Roddy Doyle (The Guts), Dave Eggers (The Circle), Jhumpa Lahiri (The Lowland), Joanathan Lethem (Dissident Gardens), Thomas Pynchon (Bleeding Edge) and many others.

See the complete longlist for the 2015 Dublin IMPAC award here. The winners will be announced June 2015.

Stars of the Party

Earlier this year, Kirkus Reviews announced the creation of the Kirkus Prize, “one of the richest annual literary awards in the world.” Flavorwire explains that “in order for a work to be eligible, it needed to receive a Kirkus star (denoting quality) and to be published between November 2013 [and] November 2014. The judges ended up sifting through quite a few books: 266 fiction; 225 nonfiction, 446 children/teens; and 70 self-published Kirkus Star titles. The winners will be announced at a special ceremony in Austin, Texas, on Thursday, October 23, 2014.” Below are the finalists.

Fiction:
• The Blazing World, by Siri Hustvedt (Simon & Schuster)
• Euphoria, by Lily King (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• All Our Names, by Dinaw Mengestu (Knopf)
• Florence Gordon, by Brian Morton (Houghton Mifflin)
• The Remedy for Love, by Bill Roorbach (Algonquin Books)
• The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters (Riverhead)

Nonfiction:
• Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, by Roz Chast (Bloomsbury)
• Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press)
• The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert (Holt)
• The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science, by Armand Marie Leroi (Viking)
• Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty (Harvard University Press)
• Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, by Bryan Stevenson (Spiegel & Grau)

Young Readers’ Literature:

Picture Books:
• The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus, by Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet (Eerdmans)
• Aviary Wonders Inc.: Spring Catalog and Instruction Manual, by Kate Samworth (Clarion)

Middle Grade:
• El Deafo, by Cece Bell (Amulet/Abrams)
• The Key That Swallowed Joey Pigza, by Jack Gantos (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Young Adult:
• The Story of Owen, Dragon Slayer of Trondheim, by E.K. Johnston (Carolrhoda Lab)
• The Freedom Summer Murders, by Don Mitchell (Scholastic)

Can’t We Just All Get a Long (List)?

Two quite different long lists of book prize contenders have been announced this week. First off, we have the rundown of nominees for the 2014 National Book Award for fiction, as reported by The New York Times:

• An Unnecessary Woman, by Rabih Alameddine (Grove Press)
• The UnAmericans, by Molly Antopol (Norton)
• Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr (Scribner)
• Redeployment, by Phil Klay (Penguin Press)
• Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf)
• Thunderstruck & Other Stories, by Elizabeth McCracken (Dial Press)
• Orfeo, by Richard Powers (Norton)
• Lila, by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Some Luck, by Jane Smiley (Knopf)

The Times adds that “Five finalists in four categories--young people’s literature, poetry, nonfiction and fiction--will be announced on Oct. 15, and the winners will be recognized at an awards gala on Nov. 19 that will be hosted by Daniel Handler, a.k.a Lemony Snicket.”

Meanwhile, The Rap Sheet brings word that the British Crime Writers’ Association has released its long list of nominees for the 2014 Dagger in the Library award, intended to honor “an author’s whole body of work to date, rather than a single title.” The contestants (chosen this year by readers voting online) are listed below, together with the names of their usual publishers:

• M.C. Beaton (Constable & Robinson)
• Tony Black (Black and White Publishing)
• Sharon Bolton (Transworld Publishers)
• Elly Griffiths (Quercus)
• Mari Hannah (Pan)
• James Oswald (Michael Joseph)
• Phil Rickman (Corvus)
• Leigh Russell (No Exit Press)
• Mel Sherratt (Thomas & Mercer)
• Neil White (Sphere)

A short list of Dagger in the Library nominees will be announced on November 3, with the winner slated to be revealed during an event in London in late November.

READ MORE: “What Do This Year’s Wildly Disparate National Book Award Longlists Mean?” by Elisabeth Donnelly (Flavorwire).

Peter Brown Wins 2014 Bull-Bransom Award

Author and artist Peter Brown has won the 2014 Bull-Bransom Award for his illustrations for Mr. Tiger Goes Wild (Little Brown), which he also wrote.

The panel of judges called the book “an exceptional tribute to the wild and rambunctious energy in all children” praising the way the book “plays around with the idea of ‘wildlife’ in very visual ways.”

Mr. Tiger Goes Wild is the story of an anthropomorphic tiger who grows bored with his very proper town life and decides to get in touch with his wild side. Brown said that this is “perhaps my most autobiographical book to date. I was fortunate enough to grow up with easy access to streams and forests and fields and the animals that inhabited those places. But in today’s world, fewer and fewer children have access to the natural world, and therefore, are less likely to feel connected to it. And so I try to tell stories that will pique every child's curiosity and appreciation for nature,” says Brown, who adds that he’s “thrilled and honored” to receive the Bull-Bransom Award and “have my book recognized by such a prestigious institution.”

The National Museum of Wildlife Art named the award for Charles Livingston Bull and Paul Bransom, among the first American artist-illustrators to specialize in wildlife subjects. The winner is presented with a medal and $5,000 cash award.

Also nominated:

• Cheer Up, Mouse! by Jed Henry (Houghton Mifflin)
• FROG SONG by Brenda Guiberson (Henry Holt)
• if you want to see a whale by Julie Fogliano (Roaring Brook Press)
• I’m the Scariest Thing in the Jungle by David G. Derrick, Jr. (Immedium)

Doctorow Wins Library of Congress Prize

E.L. Doctorow (Ragtime, World’s Fair) has been awarded the 2014 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Previous winners have included Isabel Allende, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison. According to the New York Times Artsbeat blog:

[Doctorow] said the prize was particularly important to him because the nominees are chosen by past winners and other esteemed authors and critics. “To have the regard of one’s peers is immensely moving,” he said.

Doctorow will receive the award in a ceremony at the Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington on August 30th.

Doctorow’s newest book, Andrew’s Brain (Random House) was published in January. The London Sunday Times got hyperbolic about the book, calling it “A tantalising tour de force … it fizzes with intellectual energy, verbal pyrotechnics and satiric flair.”

“Poo Wins Prizes”

A couple of fast facts:

1. There are books out there on every topic, and…
2. Some of them are kinda nuts.

Seemingly in celebration of these two things, the UK’s Diagram Awards annually honor the oddest title of the year. The winner usually receives, “ a fairly passable” bottle of claret, according to Horace Bent, of The Bookseller.

“The public have chosen wisely,” writes Bent on How to Poo on a Date’s 2014 win. “Not only have they picked a title that truly captures the spirit of the prize, they have selected a manual that can help one through life’s more challenging and delicate moments.” From We Love This Book:

The book, by Mats & Enzo, published by Prion Press, topped a public vote to find the oddest title, in one of the closest contests in prize history. In the end, How to Poo on a Date: The Lovers' Guide to Toilet Etiquette, took home the title with 30 per cent of the vote, beating into second place Are Trout South African? by Duncan Brown (Pan South Africa) and The Origin of Feces by David Waltner-Toews (ECW Press), which both captured 23 per cent of voters.

The rest of the shortlist was made up of early frontrunner Working Class Cats: The Bodega Cats of New York City by Chris Balsiger ands Erin Canning (One Peace Books), with 14 per cent; Pie-ography: Where Pie Meets Biography by Jo Packham (Quarry) with 6 per cent ; and How to Pray When You’re Pissed at God by Ian Punnett (Harmony Books), with 4 per cent of the votes.

Nor is How to Poo on a Date the author’s first run at the prize. How to Poo on Holiday, How to Poo at Work and How to Bonk at Work, were all previously nominated for the prize.

The Diagram Prize was founded in 1978 as a way of relieving boredom at the Frankfurt Book Fair by Diagram Group co-founders Trevor Boundford and Bruce Robertson.

Bailey’s Fiction Prize Announces Longlist

Though you may not have heard of the Bailey’s Woman’s Prize for Fiction before, it’s only because it’s wearing a new hat. Between 1995 and 2012 it was known as the Orange Prize, for the British telecom that sponsored it all those years. And though the prize has been riddled with controversy over the years (Man Booker Prize winner A.S. Byatt was not the only one to call the award “sexist”) it has successfully helped increase the profile of an ever-larger number of women writers.

The finalists for the 2014 prize were announced this morning. And with Bailey’s now in the key sponsorship position, the Women’s Fiction Prize should be able to go forward for many years. (And, yes: we are talking that Bailey’s: “The world’s first cream liqueur, a unique blend of smooth Irish cream with quality spirits and whiskey … the world’s biggest seller, with over 82 million bottles sold world wide each year” and so on.)

At the time of the announcement of their support for the Prize last summer, the company said that “BAILEYS wants to inspire and enrich the lives of women, bringing the power of spirited stories and storytellers to ever-wider audiences.”

And so here we are.

The winner of this year’s Prize will be announced at a ceremony in London on June 4th. She will receive a cheque for £30,000 and a limited edition bronze known as the Bessie, created and donated by the artist Grizel Niven.

Previous winners include A.M. Homes for May We Be Forgiven (2013), Madeline Miller for The Song of Achilles (2012), Téa Obreht for The Tiger’s Wife (2011), Barbara Kingsolver for The Lacuna (2010), Marilynne Robinson for Home (2009), Rose Tremain for The Road Home (2008), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun (2007), Zadie Smith for On Beauty (2006), Lionel Shriver for We Need to Talk About Kevin (2005), Andrea Levy for Small Island (2004), Valerie Martin for Property (2003), Ann Patchett for Bel Canto (2002), Kate Grenville for The Idea of Perfection (2001), Linda Grant for When I Lived in Modern Times (2000), Suzanne Berne for A Crime in the Neighbourhood (1999), Carol Shields for Larry’s Party (1998), Anne Michaels for Fugitive Pieces (1997), and Helen Dunmore for A Spell of Winter (1996).

The judges for the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction are: Helen Fraser, (Chair), Chief Executive of the Girls’ Day School Trust; Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge; Denise Mina, Writer; Caitlin Moran, Times columnist, Author and Screenwriter; Sophie Raworth, BBC Broadcaster and Journalist.

Finalists for the 2014 Bailey’s Women’s Fiction Prize:

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigerian, 3rd Novel) Americanah (Fourth Estate)
• Margaret Atwood (Canadian, 14th Novel) Maddaddam (Bloomsbury) 
• Suzanne Berne (American, 4th Novel) The Dogs of Littlefield (Fig Tree)
• Fatima Bhutto (Pakistani, 1st Novel) The Shadow of the Crescent Moon  (Viking)
• Claire Cameron (Canadian, 2nd Novel) The Bear (Harvill Secker)
• Lea Carpenter (American, 1st Novel) Eleven Days (Two Roads)
• M.J. Carter (British, 1st Novel) The Strangler Vine (Fig Tree)
• Eleanor Catton (New Zealand/Canadian, 2nd Novel) The Luminaries (Granta)
• Deborah Kay Davies (British, 2nd Novel) Reasons She Goes to the Woods (Oneworld) 
• Elizabeth Gilbert (American, 2nd Novel) The Signature of All Things (Bloomsbury)
• Hannah Kent (Australian, 1st Novel) Burial Rites (Picador)
• Rachel Kushner (American, 2nd Novel) The Flamethrowers (Harvill Secker)
• Jhumpa Lahiri (Indian/American, 2nd Novel) The Lowland (Bloomsbury)
• Audrey Magee (Irish, 1st Novel) The Undertaking (Atlantic Books)
• Eimear McBride (Irish, 1st Novel) A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (Gallery Beggar Press)
• Charlotte Mendelson (British, 4th Novel) Almost English (Mantle)
• Anna Quindlen (American, 7th Novel) Still Life With Bread Crumbs (Hutchinson)
• Elizabeth Strout (American, 4th Novel) The Burgess Boys (Simon and Schuster)
• Donna Tartt (American, 3rd Novel) The Goldfinch (Little, Brown)
• Evie Wyld (British, 2nd Novel) All the Birds, Singing (Jonathan Cape)

First Folio Prize Announces Shortlist

Judges today announced the shortlist for the first ever Folio Prize, an international award intended to celebrate books and reading.

According the Folio Prize web site, the prize has been designed “to allow a breadth of writing and opinion to be represented, while encouraging a consistent focus on excellence.”

Sixty books are nominated by the Folio Prize Academy, “an international group of people who write, review and delight in books.” An additional 20 books are called in by the judges, “subsequent to advocacy by publishers, who may write in on behalf of five titles per imprint.”

The judges read the 80 books and produce a shortlist of eight. The contender for the first ever Folio Prize are:

• Red Doc by Anne Carson (Random House/Jonathan Cape)
• Schroder by Amity Gaige (Faber & Faber)
• Last Friends by Jane Gardam (Little, Brown)
• Benediction by Kent Haruf (Picador)
• The Flame Throwers by Rachel Kushner (Random House/Harvill Secker)
• A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride (Galley Beggar Press)
• A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava (Maclehose Editions)
• Tenth of December by George Saunders (Bloomsbury)

From this eight, the judges will choose a winner which will be announced in a ceremony at St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel in London on March 10th, with the winner receiving a cheque for £40,000.

Munro Won’t Be First Winning Author Not to Attend Nobel Award Ceremony

Alice Munro, “Canada’s Chekov,” won’t be traveling to Sweden to collect her  Nobel Medal and her cheque for eight million Swedish kronor (About $1.3 million) on December 10. According to the Victoria Times Colonist, the 82-year-old author is too frail to make the trip, but that their, Jenny Munro, daughter will go in her place:

Jim Munro of Munro’s Books said Friday his former wife cannot make the trip because her health is delicate.
“She’s not well enough to go,” he said. “She’s happy. She’s not bed-ridden or anything. Just too fragile to take such a trip.”

Inside the Stockholm Concert Hall.

According to The Guardian, Munro isn’t the first winner who didn’t make the trip for health reasons:

Doris Lessing, who was 87 when she won the prize in 2007, was advised by doctors not to travel, because of back trouble, and the Nobel Foundation came to London to award the prize instead.

Harold Pinter, then 75, didn't go in 2005, citing poor health, and Austria's Elfriede Jelinek declined the year before that, saying that she was "not in a mental state to withstand such ceremonies".

Announcing the award, Englund described Munro as the "master of the contemporary short story", with a "power of observation that is almost uncanny" and an "intelligence and power of observation that could be a bit problematic, because she sees through people".

January Magazine announced Munro had won the Nobel Prize for Literature on October 10th. You can see that piece here.

National Book Awards Finalists: More Popular Choices in 2013

The finalists for the National Book Awards were announced this morning on NBC’s Morning Joe. The method of information delivery chosen was reflected in the lists of books delivered. Books by Jhumpa Lahiri, Thomas Pynchon and Rachel Kushner demonstrated that the trend towards highlighting books likely to be enjoyed by a wider sampling of readers. As NPR pointed our last month:

In recent years, the National Book Awards have been criticized for nominating obscure authors whose books don't sell as well as winners of the Pulitzer Prize or the Man Booker Prize. Thus the changes instituted this year: nonwriters such as librarians, book sellers and critics have been included in the judging panels. And instead of one announcement of five nominees in each category, this week's rollout of longer lists, 10 in each category, followed in about a month by a short list.

The resulting lists (and that Morning Joe announcement) would indicate the NBA people are working hard to raise awareness and readability of their awards. I suppose there’s not much they can do about the fact that when people hear “NBA” books seldom are seldom that first things that jump to mind.

The winners will be announced on November 20th.

Here are the finalists for the 2013 National Book Awards:

Fiction

• Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (Scribner/Simon & Schuster)
• Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House)
• James McBride, The Good Lord Bird (Riverhead Books/Penguin Group)
• Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (The Penguin Press/Penguin Group)
• George Saunders, Tenth of December (Random House) 

Non-Fiction

• Jill Lepore, The Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House)
• Wendy Lower, Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 (W.W. Norton & Company)
• Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House)

Poetry

• Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay, Illusion (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Adrian Matejka, The Big Smoke (Penguin Poets/Penguin Group USA)
• Matt Rasmussen, Black Aperture (Louisiana State University Press)
• Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems (Graywolf Press)

Young People’s Literature

• Kathi Appelt, The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp (Atheneum Books for Young Readers/Simon & Schuster)
• Cynthia Kadohata, The Thing About Luck (Atheneum Books for Young Readers/ Simon & Schuster)
• Tom McNeal, Far Far Away (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House)
• Meg Rosoff, Picture Me Gone (G.P. Putnam's Sons/Penguin Group)
• Gene Luen Yang, Boxers & Saints (First Second/Macmillan)

Man Booker Prize 2013: Youngest Author & Biggest Book

When the dust settled after the winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize was announced today a couple of records had been broken. At 28, Winner Eleanor Catton was the youngest winner in the history of the prize and at 832 pages, the novel she won for, The Luminaries, is the longest ever Man Booker Winner.

In their announcement, the Man Booker people pointed out another couple noteworthy facts: Catton is only the second New Zealander to win the prize, though many would likely say it was overdue: Keri Hulm won for The Bone People back in 1985. Also, with 151 authors competing for the prize this year, it was the largest Man Booker field ever.

Man Booker judge Robert Macfarlane said the book was a “dazzling work, luminous, vast.” He added that it was “a book you sometimes feel lost in, fearing it to be ‘a big baggy monster,’ but it turns out to be as tightly structured as an orrery.”

The Luminaries is set during the 1866 New Zealand gold rush. Twelve me have gathered for a meeting in a hotel when a traveler stumbles into their midst. The story involves a missing rich man, a dead hermit, a huge sum in gold, and a beaten-up whore. There are sex and seances, opium and lawsuits in the mystery too. The multiple voices take turns to tell their own stories and gradually what happened in the small town of Hokitika on New Zealand’s South Island is revealed.

The winner of the Man Booker Prize receives £50,000 (about $80,000) and, like all the shortlisted authors, a cheque for £2,500 and a designer bound copy of their book. ◊

Alice Munro Wins Nobel Prize for Literature

Alice Munro has become the second Canadian and the 13th woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The 81-year-old author, affectionately known as “Canada’s Chekov” for her deft hand with both short stories and human relationships, was surprised this morning when her daughter woke her to tell her the news. From CBC:

Reached in British Columbia by CBC News on Thursday morning, Munro said she always viewed her chances of winning the Nobel as “one of those pipe dreams” that “might happen, but it probably wouldn’t.” 

“It’s the middle of the night here and I had forgotten about it all, of course,” she told the CBC’s Heather Hiscox early Thursday.
Munro called the honour “a splendid thing to happen.”

Munro said her husband, Gerald Fremlin, a geographer/cartographer who died in April, would have been very happy, and that her previous husband, James Munro, with whom she has three children, and all her family were thrilled.

The Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to 110 Laureates since 1901. Upon naming her the winner, the Royal Swedish Academy called Munro a “master of the contemporary short story.” In 2009 Munro was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work.

The Nobel Prize amount for 2013 is set at 8.0 million Swedish kronor, which is about 1.2 million dollars.

Murakami Odds on Favorite to Win Nobel Prize

Who will get the Nobel nod for Literature come October? Of course it’s anyone’s guess at this point, but at the moment British-based gaming company Ladbrokes is predicting Haruki Murakami by offering 3-1 odds that the Japanese novelist will take home the money.

The author, 64, became a household name in his native country with his 1987 novel Norwegian Wood. A departure from his earlier work, its use of realism and simple plotting helped him to reach a larger audience and established Murakami as the voice of the Japanese baby-boomer generation. The book was adapted for the screen in 2010 by French-Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung.

Other contenders for the Nobel Prize for Literature include Joyce Carol Oates with 6-1 odds; Alice Munro at 12-1; Philip Roth 16-1, Milan Kundera at 21-1 and Cormac McCarthy, Darcia Maraini, Nuruddin Farah; Salman Rushdie; Margaret Atwood and Don DeLillo all at 40-1.

You can see the complete list of contenders here.

Hemingway: Each Book a New Beginning

“For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.”

In 1954, Ernest Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, a prize which, at the time, he said he felt unworthy of. Hemingway said publicly that Isak Dinesen, Bernard Berenson and Carl Sandburg had each been more deserving than he.

Eventually, Hemingway gave in and accepted both the honor and the award (thoughts are, he needed the money) but he didn’t personally attend the ceremony, opting instead to have the US Ambassador to Sweden read a lovely acceptance speech which Hemingway had written for the occasion.

Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings reproduces a transcript of the speech here, as well as an excerpt of it recorded in Hemingway’s own voice at a later date.

Doing What to the Chicken Coop?

There’s just not a lot we want to add to this piece that comes to us from the Huffington Post via AP. So here’s a snippet, with the appropriate link at the end. If this tickles you, too, you’ll want to follow and read more. Ready?

A supernaturally tinged barnyard manual has won Britain’s quirkiest literary award, the Diagram Prize for year’s oddest book title. 

“Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop” by Reginald Bakeley was awarded the prize Friday by trade magazine The Bookseller. 

The book took 38 percent of the votes in a public ballot, beating finalists including “How Tea Cosies Changed the World,” “Was Hitler Ill?” and “God's Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis.”

There’s more at HuffPost here.

Bull-Bransom Award Finalists Announced

The names of five finalists for the National Museum of Wildlife Art’s 2013 Bull-Bransom Award have been announced. The annual award honors illustrators’ unique takes on wildlife, and this year’s special five range from tiny mouse to friendly moose.

The award is presented annually by the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and is in place to recognize excellence in children’s book illustration with a focus on wildlife and nature.

“The illustrations in the five finalist books for this year’s Bull-Bransom Award are beautiful, creative, and interesting,” says Bronwyn Minton, assistant curator of art for the museum and a member of the finalist selection panel. “This award continues to highlight talented illustrators of animals and humanity’s relationship with nature.”

The winner will be announced at the museum on May 3, 2013, as part of its Celebration of Young Artists event, with the winning illustrator invited to attend. ◊

The 2013 finalists for the Bull-Bransom Award:

• Bear Has a Story to Tell, story by Philip C. Stead, illustrations by Erin E. Stead (Roaring Book Press)
• More, story by I.C. Springman, illustrations by Brian Lies (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Nightsong, story by Ariel Berk, illustrations by Loren Long (Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers)
• Oh, No!, story by Candace Fleming, illustrations by Eric Rohmann (Schwartz & Wade Books)
• This Moose Belongs to Me, story and illustrations by Oliver Jeffers (Philomel Books)

Nobel Winner Walcott Protests

Nobel Prize-winning author Derek Walcott is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore. According to Caribbean Book Blog:

If there’s one thing that pisses off Derek Walcott, it’s the Caribbean governments’ blatant disregard for the development of the literary arts and their seeming indifference to the plight of the region’s writers and artistes.

This isn’t a new theme for Walcott. He has often been vocal in his criticism of the government of his homeland, St Lucia, “citing the absence of a theatre and a museum on the island – to this day -- as a shame and a betrayal of the people.”

But recent transgressions have the writer, who will be 83 this month, more riled than ever.

“I don’t want to make a judgment that is going to incriminate any one party or any government. Saint Lucia is going through a very tough economic crisis and naturally the arts suffer. What we have to do is keep thinking that no matter what the crisis, the arts are a necessity. But we have to have the money to sustain them. So, yes, more should be done but we need to look for subsidies for sustaining the arts. We still do not have a museum or a theatre – and that’s criminal. And no party should excuse itself for not doing that for the people. These things are not for the artistes, they are for the people of Saint Lucia.”

Walcott was a bit more acerbic when he was informed that the year-old St Lucia Labour Party government had created a new ministry called the Ministry of Creative Industries. He seemed shocked at the title. 

“That’s the name of a ministry? Someone who was creative did not do it? It’s not a nice title. I don’t know what creative industries means!”

Walcott, who is in St Lucia for Nobel Laureates Week, became even more upset when a reporter told him about a new multi-million dollar luxury resort dubbed Freedom Bay that is about to be built in Soufriere, on the island’s west coast, in the vicinity of the celebrated Pitons. It is near a UNESCO World Heritage site that the author helped work to protect in the early 1990s.

In addition to the Nobel Prize for Literature, Walcott’s illustrious career has included the Cholmondeley Award, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, the T. S. Eliot Prize and in 1972 he was named as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. He is currently Professor of poetry at the University of Essex.

The story in Caribbean Book Blog is here.

Charles Taylor Prize 2013 Shortlist Announced

The shortlist for the prestigious Canadian Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction were announced in Toronto yesterday. According to the organization:

The Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction recognizes excellence in Canadian non-fiction writing and emphasizes the development of the careers of the authors it celebrates. All five finalists will be supported by extensive publicity and promotional opportunities, including a mid-cycle author event. 

 The Prize is awarded annually to the author whose book best combines a superb command of the English language, an elegance of style, and a subtlety of thought and perception, the winner receives $25,000 and the remaining finalists each receive $2000.

Now in its 12 year, the $25,000 prize will be awarded on March 4th.

This year’s jurors read and reviewed 129 Canadian-authored non-fiction books submitted by 43 publishers from around the world.

The Finalists for the 2013 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction Are:

• The Pursuit of Perfection: A Life of Celia Franca, by Carol Bishop-Gwyn (Cormorant Books)
•  Warlords: Borden, Mackenzie King, and Canada’s World Wars, by Tim Cook (Allen Lane)
•  Journey with No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page, by Sandra Djwa (McGill-Queen’s University Press)
•  Leonardo and The Last Supper, by Ross King (Bond Street Books)
•  Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy, by Andrew Preston (Knopf Canada)

Will Ferguson Wins 2012 Giller

Though until now he has perhaps been best known for his debut work, 1997’s Why I Hate Canadians, Will Ferguson has been given the nod for the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s richest literary award.

Ferguson wins for his novel, the thriller 419 (Viking Canada/Penguin Canada). The announcement was made at a nationally televised dinner and awards ceremony hosted by CBC personality Jian Ghomeshi and attended by more than 500 members of the publishing, media and arts communities.

Ferguson takes home the $50,000 prize, with the remaining four finalists receiving $5,000 each.

Those finalists were:

Alix Ohlin for her novel Inside, published by House of Anansi Press
Nancy Richler for her novel The Imposter Bride, published by HarperCollins Publishers
Kim Thúy for her novel Ru, translated by Sheila Fischman, published by Random House Canada
Russell Wangersky for his short story collection Whirl Away, published by Thomas Allen Publishers