This news category includes reports about literary awards and prizes that are awarded for fiction, here meaning works that are not drama or poetry (i.e. are novels or short stories).
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
Booker longlist announced
Date: August 8, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Longlist for the 2007 Man Booker Prize has been revealed. From the 13 authors on the list, only one (Ian McEwan) has been nominated for the award before. Furthermore, four first-time novelists have also made the list.
This year’s longlist is:
Nicola Barker: Darkmans
Edward Docx: Self Help
Tan Twan Eng: The Gift Of Rain
Anne Enright: The Gathering
Mohsin Hamid: The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Peter Ho Davies: The Welsh Girl
Lloyd Jones: Mister Pip
Nikita Lalwani: Gifted
Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach
Catherine O’Flynn: What Was Lost
Michael Redhill: Consolation
Indra Sinha: Animal’s People
A.N. Wilson: Winnie & Wolf
Shortlist will be announced on the 6th of September, and the winner will be known on the 16th of October.
Filed under English literature, Fiction, Longlists, Novels
Montana NZ winners announced
Date: August 2, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Winners of the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards have been announced. The awards, given annually to the best writing in New Zealand, were this year dominated by Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip, which won the Medal (main prize), and was selected as the fiction winner by both the panel as well as the readers. Janet Frame, meanwhile, won the Poetry Prize for her posthumous collection The Goose Bath.
Works awarded this year in the fiction categories are:
MEDAL FOR FICTION OR POETRY, FICTION WINNER, READERS’ CHOICE AWARD: Mister Pip
by Lloyd Jones
In a novel that is at once intense, beautiful, and fablelike, Lloyd Jones weaves a transcendent story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the power of narrative to transform our lives. On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens’s classic Great Expectations. So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape. As Mr. Watts says, “A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe.†Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.
You can read more about Mister Pip at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
FICTION RUNNER UP: The Cowboy Dog
by Nigel Cox
When Chester Farlowe’s father is killed, Chester is forced to leave the vast cattle ranches of New Zealand’s central volcanic plateau for the badlands of urban Auckland. Henry Stroud, proprietor of the I Fry takeaway wagon, takes him under his wing and rechristens him “Mr. Dog.†Still full of anger six years later, Chester sets out to plot revenge on his father’s killer and finds that he must contend with Boss Lennox, the Sultation Kid, and the seductive and inscrutable Miss Peet before he gets to the showdown. This mythical story reconfigures the New Zealand experience with an absorbing coming-of-age tale.
You can read more about The Cowboy Dog at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
FICTION RUNNER UP: The Fainter
by Damien Wilkins
Unfortunately, no description is available for this work.
POETRY: The Goose Bath
by Janet Frame
Unfortunately, no description is available for this work.
BEST FIRST FICTION: The Sound of Butterflies
by Rachael King
Unfortunately, no description is available for this work.
BEST FIRST POETRY: Secret Heart
by Airini Beautrais
Unfortunately, no description is available for this work.
Filed under Commonwealth literature, Fiction, Novels, Poetry, Short stories, Winners
Frank O’Connor shortlist announced
Date: July 31, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Shortlist for the 2007 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize has been announced. The world’s richest short story award, now awarded for the third time, is funded by the Cork City Council, and awarded annually in association with the Irish Times.
This year’s shortlist consists of six authors from five countries, with only three of the nominated authors being full-time writers. Notable omissions from the original longlist include David Malouf, Alice Munro and Mary Gordon.
This year’s Frank O’Connor Prize shortlist is:
Opportunity
by Charlotte Grimshaw
Unfortunately, no description is available for this work.
No One Belongs Here More Than You
by Miranda July
In her debut collection of short stories, July introduces the possibility of a moment that can change everything. A child stands in the sidewalk; a woman lies motionless in bed beside her husband; a teacher pauses at the chalkboard; when suddenly the daily drone is disrupted by something completely unexpected. July’s characters are awkward and often remote, yet they are also profoundly sympathetic. With great compassion and generosity she reveals the idiosyncrasies, vulnerability, longing, and odd logic that govern our lives. In “No One Belongs Here More Than You July” creates a deliriously hopeful universe where strangers hug and students swim across the kitchen floor. The same energy that captivates her film audiences is transposed into exhilarating new fiction.
You can read more about No One Belongs Here More Than You at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Missing Kissinger
by Etgar Keret
A magician tries to pull a rabbit out of a hat, but takes out only its head; a guy brings a girl home with him for the first time only to find that his best friend has pissed on his doorstep; a young man graduates from Magician School but soon discovers that he can’t do everything; two drunk students do battle with a pavement and win; someone has a mother and a girlfriend who hate each other’s guts, and they both demand that he gives them the other one’s heart…many of the characters in these stories are waiting for something to change their lives, many of them can’t quite reach ultimate happiness, some of them are sick, some are abandoned, and most have trouble communicating. The unexpected can, and usually does, happen. Etgar Keret’s stories are very short - and every word counts. They are quick, brief and precise, and they move us without hesitation. They are hilarious and off-the-wall, yet also dark, sometimes violent, and often intensely poignant.
You can read more about Missing Kissinger at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue
by Manuel Muñoz
In a series of ten interconnected stories, Manuel Muñoz illuminates the lives of several Mexican-American families in the same neighborhood in Central California. In these stories, sometimes belief is all there is: belief that a better job will come, that the loved one will return love, that a surly teenager headed for trouble will straighten out, that a gay son will change–faith and hope are staples of these people’s lives. For the most part, they are disappointed. Most of the stories are of single mothers or fathers trying to raise families under the shadow of immigration and language problems and too little money. The subtext of many of the stories is homosexuality, not a lifestyle embraced by the Mexican-American community.
You can read more about The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Valentines
by Olaf Olafsson
Olaf Olafsson’s fans will recognize the perfect restraint and precision–and quick wit–with which he characteristically explores these dark epiphanies, when the heart is suddenly laid bare, whether by love or betrayal, disenchantment or regret, or the shock of loss. While their settings range from the East Coast to the West Coast, from Paris to Slovenia and Iceland, these contemporary stories probe the complexity of modern relationships over time. A wife realizes her closest confidante is much more than that. A father tries to make his new lover into the image of his late wife. A lusty photographer confronts his own mortality. A couple’s long-anticipated anniversary vacation opens onto the past. A husband, a wife, a child, a boating accident: no harm done . . . and yet? Each of the twelve stories reveals another element in the agonizing nature of passion, diminished and yet sustained over time. This is a powerful work of fiction from one of our most gifted and subtle international writers at work today.
You can read more about Valentines at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.
Award Title: The Separate Heart
by Simon Robson
If there is a thread running through Simon Robson’s brilliant collection of stories it is the notion of separateness - of adults from each other, of children from adult knowledge, of adult consciousness from the vividness of childhood. His protagonists are often unlikely - a cat, a man, met in a bar, who drove a chariot in Ben Hur, a girl who gets up very early - but these stories are satisfyingly long and devoid of modernist trickery; rather they are wise, funny, beautifully observed and somehow utterly true.
You can read more about The Separate Heart at Amazon.co.uk.
Filed under English literature, Fiction, Short stories, Shortlists, World literature
ReLit winners announced
Date: July 22, 2007 | Discussion: 2 Comments
The 2007 ReLit Awards winners have been announced. Founded in 2000 as an alternative to the major literary prizes, ReLit awards the best new fiction, short fiction and poetry published by independent Canadian publishers.
This year’s winners are:
NOVEL: Bow Grip
by Ivan E. Coyote
Ivan E. Coyote is one of North America’s most beguiling storytellers and the author of three story collections, including Loose End, which was shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction in 2006. Bow Grip, Coyote’s first novel, is a breathtaking story about love and loneliness; in it, a good-hearted, small-town mechanic struggles to deal with a wife who has left him for another woman until a used cello and an acquaintance’s suicide attempt compel him to make some changes in his life. With quiet authority, Bow Grip is about one man’s true rite of passage-trying to keep the ghosts of personal history at bay with a heart that’s as big as the endless prairie sky. (Book description)
You can read more about Bow Grip at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
SHORT FICTION: Gargoyles
by Bill Gaston
In this extraordinary new work, Gaston crafts his fiction around the idea of the “gargoyle†— the concrete representation of extremes of human emotions. In Gaston’s marvelous, riotous, Rabelaisian world, Gargoyles are physical manifestations of the disfigurements and contortions to which we human beings subject ourselves. Indeed, as Gaston wrote each story, he sketched out a distinct gargoyle to look down over it. For that reason, each story in this collection has a strange and unique guardian spirit whose sometimes benevolent, and sometimes malevolent, presence informs the characters and their actions. Gargoyles shows one of our best writers at the top of his form. (Book description)
You can read more about Gargoyles at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
POETRY: Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method
by Daniel Scott Tysdal
An energetic, funny, and experimental first poetry manuscript which takes emotional as well as formal risks. (Book description)
You can read more about Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.