This category is for news articles reporting about literary awards winners.
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
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
Kesako Matsui awarded the Naoki Prize
Date: July 18, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Kesako Matsui has won the Naoki Prize, which is a one million yen prize recognizing the best Japanese popular literature by a young author. Like the Akutagawa Award, also the Naoki Prize was established in 1935, and is awarded twice a year.
Filed under Asian literature, Fiction, Novels, Winners, World literature
Tetsushi Suwa wins Akutagawa Prize
Date: July 17, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Tetsushi Suwa has won the Akutagawa Prize for his first novel Asatte no hito (”The person of the day after tomorrow”). The semiannual literary prize is one of Japan’s most prestigious book awards, and was established in 1935 in memory of Ryunosuke Akutagawa to celebrate new and rising talent.
Earlier this year Nanae Aoyama won the same prize for her novel Hitori Biyori.