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.
Pulitzer Prize winners announced
Date: April 18, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
The 2007 winners of America’s most prestigious literary award, the Pulitzer Prize, have been announced. This year’s winners in the $10,000 fiction categories, which award works “preferably dealing with American life”, are:
FICTION: The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, `each 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 and Amazon.co.uk
DRAMA: Rabbit Hole
by David Lindsay-Abaire
A story of loss, heartbreak, and forgiveness-told through daily moments and emotional hurdles-as a family moves on after the accidental death of their four-year-old. With a critically acclaimed Broadway premiere, featuring Cynthia Nixon and Tyne Daly, Rabbit Hole has been hailed as an artistic breakthrough for the highly regarded David Lindsay-Abaire.
You can read more about Rabbit Hole at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
POETRY: Native Guard
by Natasha Trethewey
A daughter of the American South and a child of an interracial marriage that defied a law still on the books in 1966 Mississippi, Natasha Trethewey does not shy away from the difficult themes that plague the region’s past. At the spine of this collection is the forgotten story of the Louisiana Native Guards, one of the first black regiments called into service during the Civil War. The racial legacy of this war echoes through elegiac poems that honor Trethewey’s mother and tell of her own fraught childhood. A haunted and beguiling narrative, Native Guard is caught in the intersection of national and personal experience.
You can read more about Native Guard at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Filed under American literature, Drama, English literature, Fiction, Novels, Poetry, Winners
Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winners announced
Date: April 18, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
The US-based Cleveland Foundation has announced the winners of the 72nd Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which were created in 1935 to recognize outstanding works that contribute to society’s understanding of racism and foster an appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures.
There are two winners in the 2007 fiction category:
Half of a Yellow Sun
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The sweeping novel from the author of ‘Purple Hibiscus’, shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and winner of the Commonwealth Writers Award. This highly anticipated novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood. The three main characters in the novel are swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer’s house. The other is a young middle-class woman, Olanna, who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. And the third is a white man, a writer who lives in Nigeria for no clear reason, and who falls in love with Olanna’s twin sister, a remote and enigmatic character. As these people’s lives intersect, they have to question their own responses to the unfolding political events. This extraordinary novel is about Africa in a wider sense: about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race; and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these things. …
You can read more about Half of a Yellow Sun at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Blue Front: Poems
by Martha Collins
In Blue Front, Collins describes the brutal lynching of a black man and, as an afterthought, a white man, both of them left to the mercilessness of the spectators. The poems patch together an arresting array of evidence—newspaper articles, census data, legal history, postcards, photographs, and Collins’s speculations about her father’s own experience. The resulting work, part lyric and part narrative, is a bold investigation into hate, mob mentality, culpability, and what it means to be white in a country still haunted by its violently racist history.
You can read more about Blue Front: Poems at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Filed under American literature, English literature, Fiction, Novels, Poetry, Winners
Man Booker International shortlist announced
Date: April 12, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Shortlist for the 2007 Man Booker International Prize, a biennial prize awarding living authors published in English, has been announced. The listed authors are:
Chinua Achebe
Margaret Atwood
John Banville
Peter Carey
Don DeLillo
Carlos Fuentes
Doris Lessing
Ian McEwan
Harry Mulisch
Alice Munro
Michael Ondaatje
Amos Oz
Philip Roth
Salman Rushdie
Michael Tournier
Winner of the £60,000 prize will be announced in June. The first Man Booker International Prize, which was awarded two years ago, went to the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare.
Filed under American literature, Australian literature, British literature, Commonwealth literature, English literature, Lifetime awards, Shortlists, World literature
Griffin Poetry Prize announces Canadian and International shortlists
Date: April 9, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
The Griffin Trust has announced the 2007 shortlists for both their Canadian and International poetry prices. The $100,000 (Canadian) poetry prize is among the most lucrative poetry prizes in the world and is awarded annually for the best books of poetry published in English in the previous year.
CANADIAN SHORTLIST
Airstream Land Yacht
by Ken Babstock
Unfortunately, no description is available for this work.
You can read more about Airstream Land Yacht at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Strike/Slip
by Don McKay
In this extraordinary collection from one of our most celebrated poets, Don McKay walks the strike-slip fault between poetry and landscape, sticks its strange nose into the cold silence of geologic time, meditates on marble, quartz and gneiss, and attends to the songs of ravens and thrushes and to the clamour of the industrialized bush. Behind these poems lies the urge to engage the tectonics of planetary dwelling with the rickety contraption of language, and to register the stress, sheer and strain — but also the astonishment — engendered by that necessary failure. …
You can read more about Strike/Slip at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Ontological Necessities
by Priscila Uppal
Written with the verve of the uninhibited artist but with a clarity of thought and expression more akin to the scientist or scholar, these poems investigate the emotional and philosophical struggles of contemporary life. Often sparked by the horrors depicted in today’s news, the poems combine surrealist images with spare and lyrical language to grapple with an increasingly absurd world. The most ambitious piece in the collection is a radical, post-9/11 translation of the Anglo-Saxon elegy The Wanderer, and other poems include “Don Quixote, You Sure Can Take One Helluva Beating,” “Film Version of My Hatred,” “Never Held a Gun,” and “The Romantic Impulse Hits the Schoolyard.” …
You can read more about Ontological Necessities at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
INTERNATIONAL SHORTLIST
Tramp in Flames
by Paul Farley
‘A book of astonishing variety and range and no little emotional bravery, “Tramp in Flames” shows Farley rapidly becoming one of the most unfailingly interesting writers of any genre, and definitive English voices of the age.’ …
You can read more about Tramp in Flames at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Salvation Blues
by Rodney Jones
‘This expansive and accessible collection presents one hundred choice poems, including twenty-four bold new pieces, from one of America’s “best, most generous, and most brilliantly readable poets” (Poetry). In the tradition of William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, Rodney Jones conjures an America that betrays stereotyping. Playing the tension between history and modernity, his poems arise where, as James Dickey put it, “the agrarian and industrial civilizations stand face to face, equally bewildered.”‘ …
You can read more about Salvation Blues at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Ooga-Booga: Poems
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.’ …
You can read more about Ooga-Booga: Poems at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Scar Tissue
by Charles Wright
‘In his new collection, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Wright investigates the tenuous relationship between description and actuality–”thing is not an image”–but also reaffirms the project of attempting to describe, to capture the natural world and the beings in it, although he reminds us that landscape is not his subject matter but his technique: that language was always his subject–language and “the ghost of god.” And in the dolomites, the clouds, stars, wind, and water that populate these poems, “something un-ordinary persists.”‘
You can read more about Scar Tissue at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Filed under American literature, British literature, Canadian literature, English literature, Poetry, Shortlists
International IMPAC Literary Award shortlist announced
Date: April 9, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Shortlist for the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, which at 100,000€ is the world’s most lucrative prize for a single work of fiction published in or translated into English, has been announced. The list of eight novels, selected from 169 novels nominated by libraries from around the world, is:
Arthur and George
by Julian Barnes
Praised as a “master storyteller†(The Wall Street Journal) and hailed for his “flawless use of language†(Boston Herald), Irish author and playwright Sebastian Barry has created a powerful new novel about divided loyalties and the realities of war. In 1914, Willie Dunne, barely eighteen years old, leaves behind Dublin, his family, and the girl he plans to marry in order to enlist in the Allied forces and face the Germans on the Western Front. …
You can read more about Arthur and George at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
A Long Long Way
by Sebastian Barry
Praised as a “master storyteller” (The Wall Street Journal) and hailed for his “flawless use of language” (Boston Herald), Irish author and playwright Sebastian Barry has created a powerful new novel about divided loyalties and the realities of war. In 1914, Willie Dunne, barely eighteen years old, leaves behind Dublin, his family, and the girl he plans to marry in order to enlist in the Allied forces and face the Germans on the Western Front. …
You can read more about A Long Long Way at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Slow Man
by J.M. Coetzee
Paul Rayment is on the threshold of a comfortable old age when a calamitous cycling accident results in the amputation of a leg. Humiliated, his body truncated, his life circumscribed, he turns away from his friends. He hires a nurse named Marijana, with whom he has a European childhood in common: hers in Croatia, his in France. Tactfully and efficiently she ministers to his needs. But his feelings for her, and for her handsome teenage son, are complicated by the sudden arrival on his doorstep of the celebrated Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello, who threatens to take over the direction of his life and the affairs of his heart. Unflinching in its vision of suffering and generous in its portrayal of the spirit of care, “Slow Man” is a masterful work of fiction by one of the world’s greatest writers. …
You can read more about Slow Man at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is an inventor, amateur entomologist, Francophile, letter writer, pacifist, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, Great Explorer, jeweller, detective, vegan, and collector of butterflies. When his father is killed in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre, Oskar sets out to solve the mystery of a key he discovers in his father’s closet. It is a search which leads him into the lives of strangers, through the five boroughs of New York, into history, to the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima, and on an inward journey which brings him ever closer to some kind of peace. …
You can read more about Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
The Short Day Dying
by Peter Hobbs
This is the story of four seasons in the life of Charles Wenmoth, a twenty-seven-year-old apprentice blacksmith and Methodist lay preacher in Cornwall in 1870. Life is at its hardest; poverty is everywhere. Charles crosses and recrosses the raw, beautiful landscape, attending to the sick and helping the poor, preaching in chapels with ever-dwindling congregations. He questions his faith along the way but never quite loses it, balancing it with the pleasure he takes in nature, the light in the skies, the colors of the earth, and in his attachment to a girl to whom he is drawn by the piety and patience she maintains despite her long illness. …
You can read more about The Short Day Dying at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
No Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot dead, a load of heroin, and more than $2 million in cash. Taking the money out, he knows, will change everything. But only after two more men are murdered does a victim’s burning car lead Sheriff Bell to the carnage out in the desert, and he soon realizes that Moss and his young wife are in desperate need of protection. …
You can read more about No Country for Old Men at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Out Stealing Horses
by Per Petterson
Set in the easternmost region of Norway, Out Stealing Horses begins with an ending. Sixty-seven-year-old Trond has settled into a rustic cabin in an isolated area to live the rest of his life with a quiet deliberation. A meeting with his only neighbor, however, forces him to reflect on that fateful summer. …
You can read more about Out Stealing Horses at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Shalimar the Clown
by Salman Rushdie
This is the story of Maximilian Ophuls, America’s counterterrorism chief, one of the makers of the modern world; his Kashmiri Muslim driver and subsequent killer, a mysterious figure who calls himself Shalimar the clown; Max’s illegitimate daughter India; and a woman who links them, whose revelation finally explains them all. It is an epic narrative that moves from California to Kashmir, France, and England, and back to California again. Along the way there are tales of princesses lured from their homes by demons, legends of kings forced to defend their kingdoms against evil. And there is always love, gained and lost, uncommonly beautiful and mortally dangerous. …
You can read more about Shalimar the Clown at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Filed under American literature, British literature, Commonwealth literature, English literature, Fiction, Novels, Shortlists
Philip Roth awarded the Bellow Prize
Date: April 2, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Philip Roth has been awarded the first ever PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. The price was named after Roth’s late friend and Nobel laureate Saul Bellow.
Roth, whose literary career spans six decades, is perhaps best known for such award-winning works as his 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint and the 1990s trilogy American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000).
If you are interested in Roth’s work, purchasing his books from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk (through these links) will also support this website.
The $40,000 Bellow Prize will from now on be awarded once in every two years, and voted by the members of the PEN panel for any “distinguished living American author of fiction whose body of work in English possesses qualities of excellence, ambition, and scale of achievement over a sustained career which place him or her in the highest rank of American literature.”
