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
Adam Johnson’s North Korea Novel Takes the Pulitzer Prize
A year after declining to present the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the jurors went ahead and named a winner this year. Perhaps nudged by the North Korea’s mad, headline-grabbing sabre-rattling, the award has gone to Adam Johnson’s novel of the hermit kingdom, The Orphan Master’s Son. Nathan Englander and Eowyn Ivey were the other fiction finalists.
Here are this year’s Pulitzer winners and finalists with bonus links:
Fiction:
Winner: The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson – (excerpt)
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander (Englander’s Year in Reading, excerpt)
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
Winner: Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo (The Millions Interview)
The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature by David George Haskell (excerpt)
Winner: Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall (excerpt)
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 by Bernard Bailyn (excerpt)
Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History by John Fabian Witt (excerpt)
Winner: The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss (excerpt)
Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece by Michael Gorra (excerpt)
The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw (excerpt)
Winners and finalists in other categories are available at the Pulitzer Web site.
The Nobel Prize in Literature Goes to Mario Vargas Llosa
Surprising the oddsmakers, the 2010 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. Unlike several recent winners, Vargas Llosa’s work is quite well-known in the States.
He was included in our round up this week of Latin American hopefuls, which noted that “He’s a journalist, playwright, columnist, critic, and politician (he ran for president of Peru in 1990), but most of all he’s a novelist.” That blend of political activism and literary merit often speaks to the Nobel judges, though Vargas Llosa decades ago broke with the leftist political movement in Latin America to take more of a moderate stance (this is a bit of a departure for the Nobel judges who have frequently preferred to honor writers who are vocally far to the left of center). He’s also very much a member of the “Latin American Boom” era, which saw other writers from the region like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Julio Cortázar rise to international prominence in the 1960s and 1970s.
Vargas Llosa has penned a few dozen books. Among the most well-known, particularly to American readers, are Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The Feast of the Goat, The Bad Girl (which Gregory Rodriguez called in these pages “a fun and ultimately redemptive story of obsession, made me squirm for hours.”), The War of the End of the World, and Death in the Andes. His early novel The Green House won him his first major prizes and put him on the literary map.
The aforementioned piece by our contributor Jesse Tangen-Mills includes The Time of the Hero as a good starting point and non-fiction Letters to a Young Novelist alongside The War of the End of the World as other favorites.
Doris Lessing Nabs the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature
So, it wasn’t Philip Roth, Amos Oz, Joyce Carol Oates, Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood, or Thomas Pynchon. Instead the honor has gone to Doris Lessing, a British writer who has explored themes of social issues and dabbled in science fiction. She debuted in 1950 with The Grass is Singing and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, for Briefing for a Descent into Hell in 1971, The Sirian Experiments in 1981 and The Good Terrorist in 1985 (two out of three of which are now out of print, though likely not for long). Lessing’s most recent book is The Cleft, which came out in August. And, though I’m no Lessing expert, her most notable work is thought to be The Golden Notebook from 1962. Interestingly, dating back to my bookstore days, out of all the major literary awards – the National Book Award, the Booker, and the Pulitzer – only the Nobel reliably drove significant interest. On the day the prize was announced, customers on the phone and in person would descend on the store, occasionally leading to problems when a relative unknown with little in print, like Imre Kertesz or Elfriede Jelinek, won the award.Bonus Links: The curious can dig into articles on Lessing and reviews of her work dating back to 1984 at the New York Times; much of Lessing’s copious output is available at Amazon.
2013 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: Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Americanah (excerpt, the author’s Year in Reading)
Nonfiction: Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial (excerpt)
Autobiography: Amy Wilentz, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti (<excerpt)
Criticism: Franco Moretti, Distant Reading
Biography: Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World (excerpt)
Poetry: Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog (The Poet and the Movie Star: An Evening with Frank Bidart and James Franco)
Previously: The finalists