Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi was awarded the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Prize for her novel, Call Me Zebra.
This year’s judges, Percival Everett, Ernesto Quiñonez, and Joy Williams, said of the winning title: “Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Call Me Zebra is a library within a library, a Borges-esque labyrinth of references from all cultures and all walks of life. In today’s visual Netflix world, Ms. Van der Vliet Oloomi’s novel performs at the highest of levels in accomplishing only what the written novel can show us.” (For more, check out our review of Call Me Zebra.)
The prize—which selects the best works by American citizens published in the last calendar year—has the distinction of being America’s largest peer-juried contest for fiction. The award brings with it a $15,000 prize for the winner, and $5,000 for each of the four finalists.
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi Wins 2019 PEN/Faulkner Prize
Goon Squad Takes the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
This year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction has gone to Jennifer Egan’s much praised A Visit from the Goon Squad. The win caps a year that saw this “novel in stories” go from a book anticipated by the literary set to becoming a prize winner and bestseller. Jonathan Dee and Chang-rae Lee are the runners up. Lee is a past winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, while Dee continues to receive critical notice as a novelist. Incidentally, this marks the third year in five that The Tournament of Books has predicted the Pulitzer result. The Road won both in 2007, as did The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao in 2008. Here are this year’s Pulitzer winners and finalists with excerpts where available:Fiction:Winner: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan – (excerpt, Egan’s Year in Reading, The Millions profile of Egan)The Privileges by Jonathan Dee (excerpt, The Millions interview)The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee (excerpt)General Nonfiction:Winner: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee (excerpt)The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain by Nicholas Carr (excerpt, The Millions review)Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne (excerpt)History:Winner: The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner (excerpt)Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South by Stephanie McCurryEden on the Charles: The Making of Boston by Michael Rawson (excerpt)Biography:Winner: Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow (excerpt, The Presidential Biography Project)The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley (excerpt)Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon by Michael O’BrienWinners and finalists in other categories are available at the Pulitzer Web site.
Booker Prize Offers Up Eclectic 2015 Shortlist
The Booker Prize has whittled down its longlist to an intriguing shortlist, and none of the authors tapped has previously won the Prize. As was the case last year, two Americans make the shortlist this year: Anne Tyler and Hanya Yanagihara. They are joined by Nigerian Chigozie Obioma, the UK’s Sunjeev Sahota and Tom McCarthy, and Jamaican Marlon James. The bookies suggest that Yanagihara is the favorite to win. She would be the first American to take the Prize.
All the Booker Prize longlisters are below (with bonus links where available):
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (The Book Report on A Brief History)
Satin Island by Tom McCarthy (The Last Epoch: Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island Takes on the Avant-Garde)
The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma (“The Audacity of Prose” by Chigozie Obioma, Clickworthy Headlines about The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma)
The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota
A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (Two Lives: On Hanya Yanagihara and Atticus Lish, ‘I Wouldn’tve Had a Biography at All’: The Millions Interviews Hanya Yanagihara)
2012 Costa Award Finalists Announced
The 2012 finalists for the Costa (formerly Whitbread) Book Awards have been anounced. In the “Novel” category, they are Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, Life! Death! Prizes! by Stephen May, The Heart Broke In by James Meek, and Days of the Bagnold Summer by Joff Winterhart. The Costa site has lists of the nominees in all categories.
Swedish Poet Wins Nobel Prize
Tomas Transtromer, the 80-year-old poet, became the first Swedish laureate since 1974. The Nobel committee gave Transtromer the award “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.” He is the first poet to take the $1.5 million prize since Polish poet Wisława Szymborska in 1996. The Associated Press called Transtromer a “perennial favorite,” and indeed he has ranked high in the betting odds in each of the last several years. The AP also noted that Transtromer suffered a stroke in 1990 that left him half-paralyzed but that he has continued to write. A number of collections of his poetry have been published in translation. Here are a few:
The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer
The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems
For The Living And The Dead
Truth Barriers
The Deleted World
Bonus Link: Solitude (I) by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Robertson
Herta Müller Wins the Nobel Prize for Literature
The Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to the 56-year-old German writer Herta Müller. Müller is the author of 19 books. Not all of them have been translated into English and only a handful are anywhere close to being in print. The Prize committee said Müller, “with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.” Müller was born in Romanian and emigrated to Germany in 1987. Her first books were published only in censored versions in Romania. The Nobel’s “bio-bibliography” has more.
It’s not easy at present to get a hold of a book by Müller in the U.S., but doubtless her works that have been translated into English will come back into print quickly. The Appointment was published by Metropolitan books and The Passport by Serpents Tail. Nadirs was brought out by the University of Nebraska Press, and Northwestern University Press put out The Land of Green Plums and Traveling on One Leg. The latter two are technically in print right now though I wouldn’t expect hardly any bookstore to actually have them on the shelves.
Kudos to The Complete Review for calling the Prize for Müller in advance. The Complete Review also has a good deal more information available about Müller.
2013 National Book Award Winners Announced
The 2013 National Book Award winners were announced tonight in New York City. The big prize for Fiction went to James McBride for The Good Lord Bird. Upon arriving at the podium to accept his honor, the noticeably shocked author quipped, “I didn’t think I would win today. … If any of the other writers had won, I wouldn’t feel bad because they are all fine writers, but it sure is nice to win.” His novel, a “literary rendering of John Brown,” the white abolitionist who led an unsuccessful raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia in 1859, deploys an artfulness and an irreverence that, according to one critic, “becomes not a lampooning of champions and calamities but a new kind of homage.”
The Nonfiction award went to George Packer for his “awe-inspiring X-Ray of the modern American soul,” The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. Don’t miss our full review.
The Poetry award was won by Mary Szybist for Incarnadine. During her acceptance, the poet remarked that, “Poetry is the place where speaking differently is the most prevalent.” The winner in the Young People’s Literature category was Cynthia Kadohata for The Thing About Luck.
Earlier in the presentation, E.L. Doctorow accepted the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. As our own Bill Morris attests, the award was well-deserved.
Bonus Links: Earlier in the year we dove into both the Shortlist and the Longlist to share excerpts and reviews where available.