As is usually the case, the “American literature” category defines American literature as including the literary works produced in the area of the United States of America. Consequently, this category of news contains articles related to literary prizes and awards that award fiction, poetry and drama within that country. For information about what American literary prizes I am currently tracking, see the awards list.
To see all the latest literary awards news, see the front page of The Burnt Ones: Literary Awards News.
McCarthy wins the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction
Date: August 29, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
The American Pulitzer Prize winning author Cormac McCarthy has been awarded the 2007 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction for his novel The Road.
The annual £10,000 James Tait Black Prize is the oldest literary prize in the UK, and among the most prestigious awards given for literature written in the English Language.
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
A father and his son walk alone through burned America, heading through the ravaged landscape to the coast. This is the profoundly moving story of their journey. “The Road” boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which two people, ‘each the other’s world entire’, are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.
You can read more about The Road at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Filed under American literature, British literature, English literature, Fiction, Novels, Winners
World Fantasy Award nominations
Date: August 14, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Nominees for the 2007 World Fantasy Award have been announced. A full list of nominees can be found at the World Fantasy Award website.
Filed under American literature, English literature, Fiction, Novels, Science fiction and fantasy, Shortlists
Wallace Stevens Award announced
Date: August 8, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
The American Academy of Poets has selected Charles Simic as the recipient of the 2007 Wallace Stevens Award. The $100,000 poetry prize has been awarded since 1994, and recognizes “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry” in the English language.
The Yugoslavian-born Simic’s poetry first appeared in publication after his family’s move to the United States in the late 1950s. He has since published more than twenty collections of poetry, as well as some forty other books.
Simic’s work can be found at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, and Amazon.co.uk.
Filed under American literature, English literature, Lifetime awards, Poetry, Winners
Lucille Clifton wins Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
Date: May 18, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
The poet Lucille Clifton has been given the $100,000 2007 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize lifetime achievement award, which is among the most prestigious American literary honours. Clifton has published 11 books of poetry, as well as numerous children’s books and a prose novel. She has been nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize.
Clifton’s work can be found at both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.
Filed under American literature, English literature, Lifetime awards, Poetry, Winners
Los Angeles Times Book Prize winners announced
Date: May 5, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
The 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize winners have been selected. The $1,000 award has been given out since 1980, and includes nine categories, of which four deal with fiction.
FICTION: A Woman in Jerusalem
by A.B. Yehoshua
A woman in her forties is a victim of a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem market. Her body lies nameless in a hospital morgue. She had apparently worked as a cleaning woman at a bakery, but there is no record of her employment. When a Jerusalem daily accuses the bakery of “gross negligence and inhumanity toward an employee,” the bakery’s owner, overwhelmed by guilt, entrusts the task of identifying and burying the victim to a human resources man. This man is at first reluctant to take on the job, but as the facts of the woman’s life take shape-she was an engineer from the former Soviet Union, a non-Jew on a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and, judging by an early photograph, beautiful-he yields to feelings of regret, atonement, and even love. …
You can read more about A Woman in Jerusalem at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca
FIRST FICTION: White Ghost Girls
by Alice Greenway
Two sisters grow together and apart into their emerging selves. Frankie pulses with curiosity and risk; Kate is watchful, all eyes and ears. Immersed in the heat and colours of Hong Kong in the 1960s, theirs is a world of fishermen and insurgents, temple gods and ghosts, of blinding light and dark, dark waters. As Frankie’s behaviour becomes more and more outrageous, in her defiant attempt to win her parents’ attention, Kate retreats into a quiet desperation, unable to act to save the one soul for whom she would sacrifice everything – Frankie.
You can read more about White Ghost Girls at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca
MYSTERY/THRILLER: Echo Park
by Michael Connelly
In 1993 Marie Gesto disappeared after walking out of a supermarket. Harry Bosch worked the case but couldn’t crack it, and the twenty-two-year-old was never found. Now, more than a decade later, with the Gesto file still on his desk, Bosch gets a call from the District Attorney. A man accused of two heinous murders is willing to come clean about several others, including the killing of Marie Gesto. Taking the confession of the man he has sought-and hated-for thirteen years is bad enough. Discovering that he missed a clue back in 1993 that could have stopped nine other murders may just be the straw that breaks Harry Bosch. …
You can read more about Echo Park at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca
POETRY: Ooga-Booga
by Frederick Seidel
From the winner of the PEN/Voelker Award, poems of love, terror, rage, and desire. The poems in Ooga-Booga are about a youthful slave owner and his aging slave, and both are the same man. This is the tenderest, most savage collection yet from “the most frightening American poet ever” (Calvin Bedient, Boston Review).
You can read more about Ooga-Booga at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca
A full list of winners and finalists can be found at the Los Angeles Times Book Prize website.
Filed under American literature, English literature, Fiction, Novels, Poetry, Winners
Locus Awards finalists named
Date: April 26, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
The 2007 Locus Awards finalists have been chosen. The prize awards science fiction and fantasy writing through a popular vote.
For a full list of finalists, see here.
