Many literary prizes announce longlists and shortlists, which include the works that are considered for the award. News about these are included in this category.
To see all the latest literary awards news, see the front page of The Burnt Ones: Literary Awards News.
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.
Filed under American literature, British literature, English literature, Fiction, Science fiction and fantasy, Shortlists
Miles Franklin Award shortlist
Date: April 20, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
A four-novel shortlist for the 2007 Miles Franklin Award has been announced. Established in 1954 with a bequest from author Miles Franklin, the prize is awarded for the novel that presents Australian life in any of its phases with the highest literary merit.
The winner of the $42,000 (Australian) award will be known on Thursday 21 June 2007.
Careless
by Deborah Robertson
Eight-year-old Pearl tries very hard to get things right. In their cramped apartment, she watches over her small brother and manages her mother’s happiness, while carefully guarding her private passions. But the events of a summer’s day are about to change Pearl’s world, and nothing may ever be right again. In a cooler, greener suburb Sonia is learning to live alone after the death of her husband, and at the edge of the city, close to the beaches, the young artist Adam Logan is hoping that his controversial exhibit will improve his fortunes. In unforeseen ways, Pearl’s tragedy will draw the threads of all their lives together. Combining the intimacy of a family’s heartache with the suspense of a thriller, “Careless” is a gripping, seductive novel about the ties of caring and responsibility that are both formed and broken in today’s society, and about the resilience of the human psyche. …
You can read more about Careless at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Carpentaria
by Alexis Wright
Unfortunately, no description is available for this work.
Dreams of Speaking
by Gail Jones
‘We must talk, Alice Black, about this world of modern things. This buzzing world.’ Alice is entranced by the aesthetics of technology and, in every aeroplane flight, every Xerox machine, every neon sign, sees the poetry of modernity. Mr Sakamoto, a survivor of the atomic bomb, is an expert on Alexander Graham Bell. The pair forge an unlikely friendship as Mr Sakamoto regales Alice with stories of twentieth-century invention. His own knowledge begins to inform her writing, and these two solitary beings become a mutual support for each other a long way from home. This novel from Man Booker longlisted author, Gail Jones is distinguished by its honesty and intelligence. From the boundlessness of space walking to the frustrating constrictions of one person’s daily existence, “Dreams of Speaking paints” with grace and skill the experience of needing to belong despite wanting to be alone. …
You can read more about Dreams of Speaking at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Theft: A Love Story
by Peter Carey
Narrated by the twin voices of the artist Butcher Bones, and his ‘damaged two-hundred-and-twenty-pound brother’ Hugh, “Theft: A Love Story” once again displays Peter Carey’s extraordinary flair for language. Ranging from the rural wilds of Australia to Manhattan via Tokyo, it is a brilliant and moving exploration of art, fraud, responsibility and redemption. …
You can read more about Theft: A Love Story at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Filed under Australian literature, Commonwealth literature, English literature, Fiction, Novels, Shortlists
National Short Story Prize shortlist announced
Date: April 18, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
The 2007 National Short Story Prize shortlist has been announced. The Brittish prize, which is the largest in the world for a single short story, gives £15,000 for the winning story, £3,000 for the runner-up, and £500 for the other three stories on the shortlist. The award is open to UK nationals or residents who are 18 or older. The story must not be more than 8000 words. The prize is funded by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.
This year’s shortlist, from which the winner will be announced on Monday 23 April, is:
‘Slog’s Dad’ by David Almond
‘The Morena’ by Jonathan Falla
‘The Orphan and the Mob’ by Julian Gough
‘How to Get Away with Suicide’ by Jackie Kay
‘Weddings and Beheadings’ by Hanif Kureishi
Filed under British literature, English literature, Fiction, Short stories, Shortlists
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
