News
Update
Awards & Honors
For the first time,
the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was won by two novels this year. Both books
explore class in America at opposite extremes. In Demon Copperhead,
Barbara Kingsolver tells the story of a boy confronting poverty and addiction
in contemporary Appalachia. Trust, by Hernan Diaz, focuses on the lives
of a wealthy couple in New York during the Roaring Twenties and the subsequent
Great Depression. The prize's finalist, The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini
Vara, examines both ends of the class spectrum in its tale of a Dalit child
turned CEO.
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch was the winner of the Booker Prize 2023. The Chair of Judges described the near-future dystopian novel as a "visceral reading experience" that "captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment." The book features a unique format without standard paragraph breaks or quotation marks.
Norwegian author Jon
Fosse won the Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 "for his innovative plays and
prose which give voice to the unsayable". He writes in Nynorsk, the
standard more common in the western part of his home country, where he was born
in 1959 and where much of his writing is set. The Swedish Academy describes his
debut play, Nokon kjem til å komme, as articulating "the most
powerful human emotions of anxiety and powerlessness in the simplest everyday
terms". He previously won the 2015 Nordic Council Literature Prize for his
prose trilogy, Andvake, Olavs Draumar, and Kveldsvævd.
The 2023 National Book
Award for Fiction was awarded to Justin Torres for his sophomore novel Blackouts.
The judges cite his historical fiction work as "slowly unfolding more and
more inventive 'blackouts'—revealing, divulging, or re-elaborating mainstream
narratives and thus creating newer and truer meanings."
Craig Santos Perez won
the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry for from unincorporated territory
[åmot]. The parenthetical title refers to the Chamoru word for medicine, as
this collection focuses on how storytelling can aid indigenous communities in
healing from colonialism, systemic injustice, and loss of connection with their
culture.
The Center for
Fiction, a literary nonprofit based in Brooklyn, awarded its 2023 Medal for
Editorial Excellence to Graywolf Press. Founded in 1974 and currently located
in Minneapolis, Graywolf Press is an independent publisher of fiction,
nonfiction, poetry, and work in translation. Graywolf books and authors have
won the Pulitzer Prize, Booker Prize, Nobel Prize for Literature, and the
National Book Award.
This year saw the
inauguration of two new literary awards. The Joan Margarit International Poetry
Prize was created to honor poets whose body of work has achieved international
recognition. Its first winner is Sharon Olds, a California-born poet whose work
the jury describes as "non-conformist and genuine writing." Olds'
poetry ranges from detailing her personal life to examining world events. Her
collection, Stag's Leap, won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize.
The Armory Square
Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation was launched to promote the
visibility of translated works of fiction and nonfiction from a South Asian
language into English. The winner will have their translation published.
Musharraf Ali Farooqi won for his translation of Siddique Alam’s short story
“The Kettledrum”, which depicts an Adivasi widow and her husband’s ghost.
Farooqi’s translation will be published by Open Letter Books in 2024 in the
collection The Kettledrum and Other Stories.
New Releases
The United States Poet
Laureate Ada Limón presents a diverse literary landscape in the new anthology
You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World. Edited and introduced by Limón,
the fifty-poem collection aims to bring readers on a meditative walk through a
“small forest of poetry”. Included in the anthology are previous U.S. Poet
Laureate Joy Harjo, Rigoberto González, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil.
Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín’s 2009 novel centered on a young Irish immigrant to the namesake borough, receives a sequel in his new work, Long Island. The follow-up features protagonist Eilis Lacey returning to her home country for the first time in decades after receiving shocking news. The New Yorker hails Long Island as “a narrative of remarkable power with a sparseness and intensity that gives immense emotional impact.”
Salman Rushdie has
released a new memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. In
the book, the celebrated author recounts the attempt on his life at a lecture
on the importance of protecting persecuted writers in 2022. More importantly,
in Rushdie’s own words, his new work moves beyond the attack into his recovery
process, where with the help of his wife and fellow writer Eliza Griffiths,
“love wins.”
Notable
Departures
Brooklyn author Paul Auster died last month at 77. His breakout work was The New York Trilogy, a postmodern mystery series exploring the nature of personal identity. In addition to novels, Auster also wrote for the screen, winning the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay for Smoke in 1995. He was particularly celebrated in France, where he lived for a time after college translating French poetry. In 2007, he received a medal as a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters of France. His penultimate novel, 4 3 2 1, a tale of four parallel lives, was shortlisted for the 2017 Booker Prize.
Acclaimed author
Cormac McCarthy passed away last summer at the age of 89. Two of his most
famous works were set in the American Southwest, where he spent the latter part
of his life. Blood Meridian, an epic, violent Western, is widely
considered his magnum opus. All the Pretty Horses, a more romantic
Western, won the National Book Award in 1992. McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic tale
of a father and son, The Road, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007.
Translator Edith
Grossman died at 87 last fall. Grossman raised the visibility of the work of
translators when she became one of the first to have her name on a book cover
beside the original author’s. Her translation of Don Quixote is considered
among the best, and author Gabriel García Márquez described her as “his voice
in English.”
Gita Mehta, both a writer and filmmaker, died this past fall in her home in New Delhi, India at 80 years old. Mehta first began a career in documentary film covering the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. It was later on in 1979 that she made her writing debut with Karma Cola, a nonfiction book tackling the cultural misunderstandings of Westerners visiting India. Mehta’s later books include Raj, a fictional tale of an Indian princess, and Snakes and Ladders, an essay collection on Indian life released on the fiftieth anniversary of the country’s independence. She was married to Sonny Mehta, former head of Knopf publishing house, who passed away in 2019.
Poet Louise Glück
passed away last fall at the age of 80. Glück won many honors over the course
of her life, including being appointed the United States Poet Laureate from
2003 to 2004. Her book The Wild Iris won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and in 2020
she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. On the subject of death, Glück
wrote in her poem “October”: “death cannot harm me more than you have harmed
me, my beloved life.”
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