Maryse Conde Wins the Alternate Nobel Prize In Literature!

I came across an article on the Wall Street Journal titled, Not-the-Nobel Prize in Literature Is Announced by Brenda Cronin. In the article, Brenda Cronin wrote the following:

Maryse Condé, a chronicler of the colonial experience and its aftermath, won the New Academy Prize in Literature Friday. 

Ms. Condé was praised as “a grand storyteller” whose “authorship belongs to world literature,” according to the New Academy. The Stockholm-based nonprofit stepped in to honor a writer this year after the Swedish Academy postponed the Nobel Prize in literature.

Ann Pålsson, a Swedish publishing veteran who headed the New Academy’s four-person jury, announced the decision in the rotunda of the Stockholm Public Library. 

In an interview Friday, the 81-year-old Ms. Condé said she was delighted, proud—even astonished—to have won the award. She expressed hope that the New Academy might continue its work, particularly because the organization involved librarians in choosing nominees. 

In a video played during the announcement in Stockholm, Ms. Condé said she would share the honor with the people of her native Guadeloupe. The island in the Caribbean where she was born “is known for hurricanes and earthquakes,” she said, “and now we are so happy to have been recognized for something else, for this prize.”

Congratulations to Maryse Conde! I've never heard of Maryse Conde before, so I will have to check out her books.

Great News For These Debut Women Writers!!

Wow, spectacular news!! I learned today through an article on Bustle's website that The 2018 Finalists For The PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize For Debut Fiction Are All Women For The First Time Ever (article written by E. Ce Miller)! How cool is that?!

In the article, E. Ce Miller writes the following:

PEN America — the New York City-based nonprofit organization dedicated advancing both literature and human rights by defending free expression and championing writers in the United States and around the world — just announced the finalists for their 2018 Literary Awards today; and for the first time in PEN America history, the nominees in their Debut Fiction category are all women. How’s that for a list of female-forward fiction you’ll definitely want to add to your TBR pile?

PEN’s prestigious PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction was established to recognize a debut novel or short story collection that not only exemplifies some of the best of what fiction has to offer each year, but also as a way to bring attention to new work demonstrates great promise in a debut writer — so basically, we can’t wait to see what all these writers have in store for us next. And, definite added bonus, the award comes with a hefty $25,000 prize as well.

Check out the women authors that have made the list by click the link at the top of my post.

2017 Pulitzer Prize Winners Have Been Announced!

I visited Bustle's website earlier today and read the following article by Cristina Arreola, 2017 Pulitzer Prize Winners Are Here & You'll Want To Add These Books To Your TBR Right Now. In the article, Cristina Arreola wrote:

For the fiction winner (and all the others in the Arts & Letters), see below:

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: The Underground Railroad by Colson WhiteheadThe Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew DesmondThe Pulitzer Prize for History: Blood in the Water by Heather Ann ThompsonThe Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography or Biography: The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between by Hisham MatarThe Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Olio by Tyehimba JessThe Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Sweat by Lynn NottageThe Pulitzer Prize for Music: Angel's Bone by Du Yun 

There are 14 categories that celebrate the best in journalism, and 21 categories in total. For details on all the winners, you can visit the Pulitzer Prize site.

Evicted and The Underground Railroad are books that I will be adding to my ever growing reading wishlist!

Bad Sex Award in Fiction?

Really?? There's actually a literary award given to 'bad sex scenes' in a work of fiction?? My first thought was, is this for real or is it a hoax? Apparently not! 

In an article in The Guardian titled, Bad Sex Award 2014: Who Should Win?, ten works of fiction have been shortlisted for this award. Check out which books were shortlisted by clicking on the link above!

2014 Nobel Prize for Literature Goes to French Writer Patrick Modiano!

Congratulations are in order for French writer Patrick Modiano! Frankly, I'd never heard of him before today. Have you? I'm now curious about his published works.

In an article I discovered on The Wall Street Journal's website titled, Patrick Modiano Wins Nobel Prize in Literature by Anna Russell and Anna Molin, I read the following:

STOCKHOLM—French author Patrick Modiano won the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature on Thursday, bringing international attention to an author known for his elegant and spare examination of memory, identity and loss. 

The 69-year-old Paris resident received the award from the Swedish Academy in Stockholm “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.” 

Mr. Modiano said he was aware that his name featured among potential contenders but was bowled over by the announcement.

“It felt like looking at a double, as if we were celebrating somebody who had my name,” the author told a packed news conference at his publisher’s offices. “I didn’t expect it at all.”

Click on the above link to read the full story. Until my next post, happy reading!! 

Murderer Writes a Crime Novel & Wins Literary Prize

I came across an article on Flavorwire titled Murderer Pens Crime Novel, Wins Literary Award By Isabella Biedenhar. In the article,  Biedenhar writes the following:

Here’s a case of someone taking the old adage “write what you know” quite literally. Alaric Hunt, who has been incarcerated since 1988 for murder and arson, won the $10,000 prize in a literary contest held by Minotaur Books and the Private Eye Writers of America. Author S.J. Rozan, one of the contest’s judges, said that Hunt’s debut novel, Cuts Through the Bone, had a “new” voice and avoided “the same wisecracking self-deprecating tone you see with a lot of private-eye books.”

Yes, the old adage “write what you know” does seem apropos in this particular instance!

Why Don't More Americans Win the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Since learning that Alice Munro won the 2013 Novel Prize in Literature on Thursday morning, I've come across an interesting article found on The New Yorker website titled Why Don’t More Americans Win the Nobel Prize? posted by Ian Crouch.

Since I am an American, I wanted to read why more Americans don't win the Nobel Prize. The article posted by Ian Crouch focuses solely on the Nobel Prize in Literature and not on the other Nobel Prize categories. I also didn't realize until after reading this article that the last American to win a Nobel Prize in Literature was Toni Morrison and that was 30 years ago in 1983.

Near the end of 'Why Don't More Americans Win the Nobel Prize?', I came across the following two paragraphs that seem to explain why more Americans have not won the Nobel Prize in Literature:

Many have seen the Nobel Prize in Literature, meanwhile, as a kind of international referendum on American literary hegemony. The prize hasn’t been awarded to an American since 1993, when Toni Morrison won. The sniping about years of snubs might just have been chalked up to sour grapes, had it not been for the comments, in 2008, by Horace Engdahl, who was at that time the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy. “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining,” he said. Not everything in the remark was outrageous; American publishers do translate too few books from other languages into English—just three per cent of books published each year are translations. Yet his remarks overlooked the fact that more than sixty million Americans speak a primary language other than English—meaning that the United States is far from being backwardly monocultural or monolingual. Philip Roth’s New Jersey is also Junot Díaz’s New Jersey.

Critics in this country responded angrily, to which later Engdahl expressed his surprise, and noted that he had perhaps been speaking too generally. He stepped down as permanent secretary in 2009, and his replacement, Peter Englund, has walked back his predecessor’s indictment of American writing. But the damage was done, and commentators began to see the Nobel Prize in Literature as being actively denied to American writers, and on the same grounds that American intellectuals have long been dismissed by Europeans. Perhaps the best way to insult an American with aspirations to cosmopolitanism is to call him and his fellows ignorant rustics, functional only in English and kept safely away from real intellectual rigor and debate by geographical isolation, local peace, and relative material abundance. The Swedes had decided that we were, as Sinclair Lewis remarked back in 1930, still “a puerile backwoods clan.”

Does this explanation seem like a fair assessment as to why more Americans have not won the Nobel Prize? Share your thoughts!

Alice Munro Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

I just learned this morning who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature through the New York Times article titled Alice Munro Wins Nobel Prize in Literature by Julie Bosman. 

 In her article, Ms. Bosman writes the following:

Alice Munro, the renowned Canadian short-story writer whose visceral work explores the tangled relationships between men and women, small-town existence and the fallibility of memory, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. Ms. Munro, 82, is the 13th woman to win the prize. 

Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy said that Ms. Munro was a “master of the contemporary short story.” 

Ms. Munro, who lives in Clinton, a town in Ontario, told a writer from The Globe and Mail this year that she planned to retire after “Dear Life,” her 14th story collection. 

In a statement from Penguin Random House, her publisher, Ms. Munro said that she was “amazed, and very grateful” for the prize. 

She added: “I’m particularly glad that winning this award will please so many Canadians. I’m happy, too, that this will bring more attention to Canadian writing.” 

Ms. Munro revolutionized the architecture of short stories, often beginning a story in an unexpected place, then moving backward or forward in time. She brought a modesty and subtle wit to her work that her admirers often traced to her background growing up in rural Canada. She said she fell into writing short stories, the form that would make her famous, somewhat by accident. 

“For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel,” she told The New Yorker in 2012. “Then I found that they were all I could do, and so I faced that. I suppose that my trying to get so much into stories has been a compensation.”

A big congratulations is in order for Alice Munro on her fantastic achievement!! 

I've yet to read a single thing written by Alice Munro that I can recall... Perhaps the time has come for me to seek out and read something written by her.

Until my next post, happy reading!

Stanford University English Professor, Adam Johnson, Wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction!

Adam Johnson  (AP Photo)

Congratulations to Adam Johnson for winning the Pulitzer Prize yesterday for his novel The Orphan Master's Son!

In an article titled Stanford professor Adam Johnson wins Pulitzer Prize for the Silicon Valley Business Journal, Azadeh Rongere writes the following:

The Pulitzer committee claimed the book, based in North Korea, to be "an exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart."

Azadeh Rongere also wrote the following in the same article mentioned above:

In an interview at the end of his book, Johnson said, "Much is written about the political, military, and economic aspects of the DPRK, but it was always the personal dimension that interested me. I wondered how families huddled under such repression and how people maintained their identities against the tide of propaganda, and whether lovers, despite the dangers, shared their intimate thoughts. So, from the beginning, my goal in this book was to create a single character that felt fully human to me."

Hardback Edition

Based on the description of The Orphan Master's Son, I'm interested in reading this novel. I find reading books told through a 'personal dimension' to be more engaging to read than from a 'political, military, or economic' perspective.  

Learning about other people's personal life experiences is more captivating, than reading about something that doesn't touch on the human element/personal dimension. People's lives are touched by various factors/life events and it is these life changing events that shape the world around us whether it be for political, military, or economic reasons and so on.