This category covers literary prizes that award poetry, rather than drama, novels or short stories.
To see all the latest literary awards news, see the front page of The Burnt Ones: Literary Awards News.
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
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
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.
Filed under Canadian literature, English literature, Fiction, Independent publishers, Novels, Poetry, Short stories, Winners
Forward Poetry Prize shortlist unveiled
Date: July 17, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Shortlist for the 2007 Forward Poetry Prize has been announced. The literary prize, created in 1991 to promote contemporary poetry, is Britain’s richest and arguably most sought-after poetry prize.
This year, which the chairman of the Forward Arts Foundation described as “exciting … with new poets being shortlisted alongside some of the most respected of their generation”, also includes the 26-year-old Luke Kennard on the shortlist for the Best Collection, making him the youngest ever to be nominated.
BEST COLLECTION (£10,000)
Domestic Violence
by Eavan Boland
Eavan Boland’s new collection turns to the domestic interiors in which the dramas of women’s lives are played out: seductions and quarrels, anger and grief, the care of children. In her attentiveness to the humdrum realities of suburban life, Boland makes them luminous with the power of live myths. Looking back over her own life, back through the lives of the women who preceded her, Boland arrives at the deep structures of memory where, as she writes, legends are made new ‘not by saying them, but by unsettling / one layer of meaning from another’. This is a collection from a poet at the height of her powers, writing with authority and grace. …
You can read more about Domestic Violence at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Gift Songs
by John Burnside
To the Shakers, a good song was a gift; indeed the test of a song’s goodness was how much of a gift it was. In their call to “labour to make the way of God your own”, Shaker artists expressed an aesthetic that had much in common with the old Japanese notion, attributed to Hokusai, that to paint bamboo, one had first to become bamboo. In his tenth collection, John Burnside begins with an interrogation of the gift song, treating matters of faith and connection, the community of living creatures and the idea of a free church - where faith is placed, not in dogma or a possible credo, but in the indefinable - and moves on through explorations of time and place, towards a tentative and idiosyncratic re-ligere, the beginnings of a renewal of the connection to, and faith in, an ordered world. The book closes with a series of meditations on place, entitled “Four Quartets”, intended both as a spiritual response to the string quartets of Bartok and Britten (as Eliot’s were to Beethoven’s late quartets), and as an experiment in the poetic form that the finest of poets, the true miglior fabbro, chose as a medium for his own declaration of faith. The poems in this collection are true gifts: thrillingly beautiful, charged with power and mystery, each imbued with the generous skills of a master of his craft. …
You can read more about Gift Songs at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
The Drowned Book
by Sean O’Brien
Many of the poems in Sean O’Brien’s new collection take their emotional tenor and imaginative cue from his acclaimed translation of Dante’s Inferno, and occupy a dark, flooded, subterranean world, as dramatically compelling as it is disquieting. Circumstances have compelled O’Brien to return repeatedly to the elegiac form, and “The Drowned Book” contains a number of powerfully moving poems written in memory of fellow poets and artists. “The Drowned Book” again shows O’Brien a master of the authoritative line, and underscores his pre-eminence among contemporary English poets. …
You can read more about The Drowned Book at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Birds with a Broken Wing
by Adam Thorpe
Adam Thorpe’s fifth collection finds purpose in the discarded, the secretive, the failed. Juxtaposing creation and destruction, hope and grief - a small boy deep down a lead mine; an unlit, nocturnal path set against the ‘insomniac’ motorway; industrialised apples against wrinkled windfalls - his poems argue for bewilderment and ‘the slight bruise of doubt’. Whether walking an abandoned road or considering a friend’s suicide, his poems remind us of our abdications, of our collapsed relationships with nature, with history, with ourselves. There are, however, all the vestiges of connective tissue - memories and mementoes, sudden, miraculous leaps of beauty. The book is full of such traces, delicate and fugitive: the poet’s grandmother retrieved through her ninety-year-old bookmark of rose petals; the unvoiced suggestion of his mother’s voice on an answerphone; the memory of a vanished native chief in a Canadian mountain’s shadow…
You can read more about Birds with a Broken Wing at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
The Harbour Beyond the Movie
by Luke Kennard
Unfortunately, no description is available for this work.
You can read more about The Harbour Beyond the Movie at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Beasts of Nalunga
by Jack Mapanje
Jack Mapanje returns to his concern for ordinary people in Africa and in the world at large. These new poems are boldly lyrical narratives, cunningly crafted in mesmerising spirals. His voice is still ironically cheerful, his tone impotently angry but confidently measured with wit and humour, however bleak. He fears the saying ‘once a prisoner always a prisoner’, and questions why prisons refuse to go away. …
You can read more about Beasts of Nalunga at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
BEST FIRST COLLECTION (£5,000)
Twenty Four Preludes and Fugues on Dimitri Shostakovich
by Joanna Boulter
Joanna Boulter’s first full-length poetry collection takes the form of a long sequence based on the life and turbulent times of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Taking Shostakovich’s “Preludes & Fugues” as her starting point, the poet puts together a deeply-considered and thoroughly-researched account of the composer’s life, with the ‘preludes’ written in free or invented forms in the third person, and the ‘fugues’ in any strict poetic form in the first person as the voice of the composer himself. The effect of these poems is cumulative and together they make an original contribution to the assessment and celebration of the life and work of Shostakovich. …
You can read more about Twenty Four Preludes and Fugues on Dimitri Shostakovich at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Galatea
by Melanie Challenger
In Galatea, her first collection, Challenger casts a poet’s sensitive eye across the hours of a tumultuous century to create startling poems whose voice - resolute, compassionate, original - both celebrates and mourns the tensions of human nature. Drawing her themes from the Pygmalion myth, Challenger portrays her subjects in trembling poise between action and inaction, consummation and defeat. …
You can read more about Galatea at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Look We Have Coming to Dover!
by Daljit Nagra
Taking in its sights Matthew Arnold’s ‘land of dreams’, the collection explores the idealism and reality of a multicultural Britain with wit, intelligence and no small sense of mischief. Nagra, whose own parents came to England from the Punjab in the 1950s, conjures a jazzed hybrid language to tell stories of aspiration, assimilation, alienation and love, from a stowaway’s first footprint on Dover beach to the disenchantment of subsequent generations. By turns realist and romantic, these charged and challenging poems never shy from confrontation, but remain, always, touched by a humorous zeal and an appetite for living. …
You can read more about Look We Have Coming to Dover! at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Andraste’s Hair
by Eleanor Rees
Bridging the divide between experimental, performance and traditional poetries the poems in “Andraste’s Hair” draw on myth, memory, folksong and murder ballad. Often set in a mythical Liverpool, a city of metamorphosis and magic, grotesque and beautiful, its buildings are a backdrop for visions and apprehensions of the past. Liverpool at night is a place where boundaries are crossed in search of knowledge, sexual, historical, and emotional - between life and death. Natural and urban landscapes - woodland, city park, dock, terraced street, the river, provide settings for an exploration of the conflict between instinctive and cultured knowledge, between abstract thought and felt experience. The poems are active and forceful - looking for answers they never find. Realities are established and than subverted. Women become trees, cities become men, roads become rivers, night becomes dawn, and the world is constantly transformed, constantly in flux. Collaborative processes inform the structure of many poems; fusion and the loss of self are preoccupying themes. The poetic voice is remade to articulate what has been discovered in the act of writing. Sometimes erotic, sometimes fierce, sometimes vulnerable the poems fuse a musical sense of language with a grounded vision of the world. …
You can read more about Andraste’s Hair at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
BEST SINGLE POEM (£1,000)
“The Hut in Question” by David Harsent (published in Poetry Review)
“Thursday” by Lorraine Mariner (published in The Rialto)
“Dunt” by Alice Oswald (published in Poetry London)
“The Day I Knew I Wouldn’t Live Forever” by Carole Satyamurti (published in The Interpreter’s House)
“Goulash” by Myra Schneider
“The Birkdale Nightingale” by Jean Sprackland (published in Poetry Review)
Filed under British literature, Canadian literature, English literature, Poetry, Shortlists
Chinua Achebe wins Man Booker International
Date: June 15, 2007 | Discussion: 1 Comment
The Nigerian novelist, poet and literary critic Chinua Achebe has won the 2007 Man Booker International Prize. The £60,000 prize is awarded once every two years to a living author, whose body of work “has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage”. This is the second time the award has been handed out, after Ismail Kadaré won it in 2005.
Achebe is probably best known for his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958) and the Booker Prize shortlisted Anthills of the Savannah (1987).
Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
One of Chinua Achebe’s many achievements in his acclaimed first novel, Things Fall Apart, is his relentlessly unsentimental rendering of Nigerian tribal life before and after the coming of colonialism. First published in 1958, just two years before Nigeria declared independence from Great Britain, the book eschews the obvious temptation of depicting pre-colonial life as a kind of Eden. Instead, Achebe sketches a world in which violence, war, and suffering exist, but are balanced by a strong sense of tradition, ritual, and social coherence. His Ibo protagonist, Okonkwo, is a self-made man. …
You can read more about Things Fall Apart at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Anthills of the Savannah
by Chinua Achebe
Chirs, Ikem and Beatrice are three like-minded friends working under the military regime of His Excellency, the Sandhurst-educated president of Kangan. In the pressurized atmosphere, they are simply trying to live and love - and remain friends. …
You can read more about Anthills of the Savannah at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Filed under African literature, English literature, Fiction, Lifetime awards, Novels, Poetry, Winners, World literature
2007 Griffin Poetry Prize winners announced
Date: June 11, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Winners of the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize have been announced. The International Award goes to Charles Wright for his Scar Tissue, while the Canadian Winner is Don McKay for Strike/Slip.
The C$100,000 poetry prize has been awarded annually since 2000, and aims to “serve and encourage excellence in poetry written in or translated into English anywhere in the world.”
INTERNATIONAL WINNER: 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, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
CANADIAN WINNER: 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, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.