The winners of the Lettre Ulysses Award – a prize for book-length reportage that I discussed a few weeks ago – have been announced. Alexandra Fuller’s account of her travels with a white, African mercenary, Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier took the 50,000 Euro first prize while A Season in Mecca: Narrative of a Pilgrimage by Moroccan Abdellah Hammoudi and Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq by Riverbend won the 30,000 Euro second prize and 20,000 Euro third prize, respectively.
Alexandra Fuller wins the Lettre Ulysses Award
2010 National Book Critics Circle Award Winners Announced
Last night, the winners of the National Book Critics Circle Award were announced in New York City. The award is voted on by critics and considers all books in English (including in translation), no matter the country of origin. The winners in the various categories and some supplementary links:
Fiction: Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (at The Millions, Egan's Year in Reading, excerpt)
Nonfiction: Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (excerpt)
Autobiography: Darin Strauss, Half a Life (excerpt)
Criticism: Clare Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West
Biography: Sarah Bakewell, How To Live: Or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (at The Millions, excerpt)
Poetry: C. D. Wright, One with Others
Previously: The finalists
●
●
●
The Booker’s Dozen: The 2011 Booker Longlist
With the unveiling of the Booker Prize longlist, the 2011 literary Prize season is officially underway. As is usually the case, the list offers a mix of exciting new names, relative unknowns and beloved standbys. The lone past winner (for The Line of Beauty) is Alan Hollinghurst, and longlisters Sebastian Barry and Julian Barnes have gotten shortlist nods in the past. At the other end of the experience specturm, four debut novelists make the list: Stephen Kelman, A.D. Miller, Yvvette Edwards, and Patrick McGuinness.
All the Booker Prize longlisters are below (with excerpts where available):
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (excerpt)
On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry (excerpt [pdf])
Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch (excerpt)
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt (excerpt)
Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvvette Edwards
The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst (excerpt)
Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman (excerpt)
The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness
Snowdrops by A.D. Miller (Staff Pick)
Far to Go by Alison Pick
The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers
Derby Day by D.J. Taylor
●
●
Booker Shocker: Finkler Takes the Prize
Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question has won the Booker Prize, beating out far better known shortlisters like C by Tom McCarthy and Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey, and Emma Donoghue's Room, which has been getting quite a lot of buzz of late.
Bloomsbury USA, the book's stateside publisher, meanwhile, got lucky with the book hitting shelves today.
The publisher's description calls the book "a scorching story of exclusion and belonging, justice and love, aging, wisdom and humanity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best."
An excerpt of the book (scroll down) begins:
He should have seen it coming.
His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one.
He was a man who saw things coming. Not shadowy premonitions before and after sleep, but real and present dangers in the daylit world. Lamp posts and trees reared up at him, splintering his shins. Speeding cars lost control and rode on to the footpath leaving him lying in a pile of torn tissue and mangled bones. Sharp objects dropped from scaffolding and pierced his skull.
Jacobson has written a number of novels. Probably the best known are The Making of Henry, Coming From Behind, and Kalooki Nights, which was on the 2006 Booker longlist and which Sara Ivry in these pages called "Hilarious, shocking, provocative."
●
●
2011 National Book Critics Circle Award Winners Announced
The winners of the National Book Critics Circle Award have been announced in New York City. The award is voted on by critics and considers all books in English (including in translation), no matter the country of origin. The winners in the various categories and some supplementary links:
Fiction: Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision (excerpt)
Nonfiction: Maya Jasanoff, Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War (excerpt)
Autobiography: Mira Bartók, The Memory Palace: A Memoir ("The Writer at the Memory Table")
Criticism: Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews ("Putting It Together," "The Millions Interview: Geoff Dyer on the London Riots, the Great War, and the Gray Lady")
Biography: John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (excerpt)
Poetry: Laura Kasischke, Space, in Chains
Previously: The finalists
●
●
●