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Over 350 book awards and prizes in all genres complete with winning books, authors, descriptions and book cover images. Many hard to find and neglected book awards in addition to the most popular and well known. See also book awards by year and book awards ordered by the number years awarded.
 



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Stand With Haiti

Subscribe to the lovethebook.com book feed mix using any reader! 2/28/2010
Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award to D. A. Powell
2/5/2010
Of course, I’d forgotten she’d died: An extract from A Scattering by Christopher Reid, the 2009 Costa Book of the Year
12/19/2009
The wedding guests look upon the cracked, pink lips of Rosie's bridegroom - an extract from Petina Gappah's An Elegy for Easterly, the 2009 Guardian First Book Award winning book
11/22/2009
Those who saw him hushed: Let the Great World Spin, the National Book Award winner by Colum McCann
10/21/2009
Four Canadians tortured in the name of fighting Terror, Kerry Pither wins Ottawa Book Award for Dark Days
10/10/2009
I've had to learn to live by writing, not the other way round. Herta Müller wins Nobel prize in literature
9/23/2009
I knew I had no hope of winning: Simon Van Booy wins Frank O'Connor Short Story Award for Love Begins in Winter
9/15/2009
I saw my soul become flesh: Jean Valentine wins Wallace Stevens Award
7/5/2009
Philip Hoare wins 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for Leviathan
6/24/2009
R. Bruce Elder wins 2009 Robert Motherwell Book Award
5/12/2009
Jane Mayer wins 2009 Helen Bernstein Award for The Dark Side
5/7/2009
Cormac McCarthy wins lifetime achievement, PEN/Saul Bellow Award
4/26/2009
Louise Erdrich's 2009 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winning book: The Plague of Doves
4/15/2009
Climatologist David Archer wins 2009 Walter P. Kistler Book Award for The Long Thaw
3/26/2009
Avi Sharon wins Harold Morton Landon Translation Award for C. P. Cavafy's Selected Poems
3/22/2009
Thomas G. Andrews wins 2009 Bancroft Prize for Killing for Coal
2/27/2009
2009 PEN/Faulkner Award to Joseph O'Neill for Netherland
2/21/2009
Stephanie E. Smallwood wins Frederick Douglass Book Prize for Saltwater Slavery
1/28/2009
2008 Costa Book of the Year Award to Sebastian Barry for The Secret Scripture
1/11/2009
MLA Awards First Book Prize to Dana Luciano for Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America
1/6/2009
Costa Book Award to Diana Athill, aged 91
12/9/2008
Guardian First Book Award for The Rest Is Noise
11/27/2008
National Book Award winner Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello
11/3/2008
Mohammed Hanif on Guardian First Book Award for A Case of Exploding Mangoes
10/18/2008
Indian writer, Aravind Adiga, wins 2008 Man Booker Prize
10/10/2008
French novelist J. M. G. Le Clezio wins Nobel Prize for Literature
9/3/2008
Edward Alwood wins Tankard Book Award for Dark Days in the Newsroom
8/24/2008
Britian's oldest book prize to Rosalind Belben for Our Horses in Egypt
8/10/2008
Michelle De Kretser wins New South Wales Premier's Book of the Year Award for The Lost Dog
7/30/2008
Kay Ryan announced as new Poet Laureate
7/16/2008
Salman Rushdie knighted as Best of the Booker Prize winners
7/4/2008
No consolation prize for Tom Bullough whose book, The Claude Glass, was mistakenly announced as the 2008 Wales Book of the Year
7/2/2008
Wales Book of the Year to Dannie Abse for The Presence
6/28/2008
Margaret Atwood wins Prince of Asturias Award for Letters
6/19/2008
Royal Society Prize for Science Books goes to Mark Lynas for Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet
6/13/2008
Rawi Hage wins wins the €100,000 Impac Dublin literary award for debut novel De Niro's Game
6/9/2008
Rose Tremain captures Orange Broadband Prize
6/2/2008
Red House Children's Book Award to Derek Landy for Skulduggery Pleasant
5/5/2008
Graham Robb wins 2008 Ondaatje Prize
5/2/2008
Raja Shehadeh wins Orwell Prize for Palestinian Walks
4/22/2008
2008 Krasnza-Krausz Book Awards announced
4/12/2008
Francis Parkman Prize to Jean Edward Smith for FDR
4/3/2008
Michael Billington wins Theatre Book Prize for The State of the Nation
4/1/2008
Marcus Rediker wins the 2008 Merle Curti Award for The Slave Ship
3/27/2008
Indra Sinha wins the South East Asia and South Pacific regional Commonwealth Writers' Best Book Prize for Animal's People
3/8/2008
2008 National Book Critics Circle Award to Harriet A. Washington for Medical Apartheid
3/5/2008
2008 Lionel Gelber Prize to Paul Collier for The Bottom Billion
3/1/2008
Robert Kirsch Award to Maxine Hong Kingston
1/23/2008
Coif Book Award to Holly Brewer
1/22/2008
2007 TS Eliot prize to Sean O'Brien
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Book Awards by Category by years awarded

   
Anti-racism and multiculturalism Book Awards

      American Book Awards
      Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards
      Arab American Book Award
      Asian American Literary Award
      Gustaf Meyers Outstanding Book Award
      Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award
      Ralph Bunche Award

   
Art Book Awards

      Charles C. Eldredge Prize
      Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
      Eric Hoffer Award for Art Books
      George Wittenborn Award
      Robert Motherwell Book Award

   
Assorted Book Awards

      New York City Book Awards
      Trillium Award

   
Biography Book Awards

      Ambassador Book Award in Biography and Autobiography
      Costa (Whitebread) Biography Award
      Elizabeth Longford Prize
      J. R. Ackerley Prize for Literary Autobiography
      James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography
      Koret Jewish Book Award for Biography, Autobiography, and Literary Studies
      Los Angeles Times Biography Prize
      National Book Critics Circle Biography and Memoir / Autobiography
      Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography

   
Children Book Awards

      Ann Connor Brimer Award for Children's Literature
      Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Fiction and Poetry
      Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Nonfiction
      Boston Globe-Horn Picture Book Award
      Branford Boase Award
      Caldecott Medal
      Carnegie Medal
      Coretta Scott King Book Award
      Costa (Whitebread) Children's Book Award
      Ezra Jack Keats Book Award
      Firecracker Alternative Book Awards for Kids
      Governor General Children's Illustration
      Governor General Children's Literature
      Guardian Award
      Jane Addams Children's Book Awards (for older children)
      Jane Addams Children's Book Awards (for younger children)
      Josette Frank Award
      Kate Greenaway Medal
      Lewis Carroll Shelf Award
      Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation
      Mildred L. Batchelder Award
      Nestlé Children's Book Prize
      Newbery Medal
      Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children's Non-Fiction
      Phoenix Award for Children's Literature
      Red House Children's Book Award
      Royal Society (Aventis) Junior Prize for Science Books
      Saskatchewan Children's Literature Award
      Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction
      Sequoyah Children's Award
      Vicky Metcalf Award

   
Comics Book Awards

      Firecracker Alternative Book Awards for Graphic Novels
      Will Eisner Best Comics-Related Book
      Will Eisner Best U.S. Edition of International Material

   
Current Events Book Awards

      Charles C. Eldredge Prize
      Helen Bernstein Book Award
      Lettre Ulysses Award
      Los Angeles Times Current Interest Book Prize
      TR Fyvel Book Award

   
Drama Book Awards

      George Freedley Memorial Award
      Governor General Drama
      Joe A. Callaway Prize
      Kurt Weill Book Prize
      Pulitzer Prize for Drama
      Theatre Book Prize

   
Fiction Book Awards

      Age Fiction Award
      Ambassador Book Award in Fiction
      Bard Fiction Prize
      BCALA Fiction Award
      BCALA First Novelist Award
      Bellwether Prize
      Boeke Prize
      Costa (Whitebread) First Novel Award
      Costa (Whitebread) Novel Award
      Ferro-Grumley Awards
      Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction
      Governor General Fiction
      Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award
      Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
      International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
      James Fenimore Cooper Prize
      James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction
      Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize
      Koret Jewish Book Award for Fiction
      Lannon Literary Fiction Awards
      Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize
      Man Booker International Prize
      Man Booker Prize
      Matt Cohen Prize
      National Book Award for Fiction
      National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award
      Orange Prize for Fiction
      Oregon Book Award for Fiction (Ken Kesey Award)
      Ottawa Book Awards English Fiction Category
      PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
      Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
      Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
      Saskatchewan Fiction Award
      Thomas Head Radall Atlantic Fiction Award

   
Film Book Awards

      Kovács Book Award
      Scripter Award
      Theatre Library Association Award

   
Gay and Lesbian Book Awards

      Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
      Ferro-Grumley Awards
      Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
      Lambda Literary Awards
      Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
      Ruth Benedict Prize
      Scotiabank Giller Prize
      Stonewall Book Awards
      Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry

   
Geography Book Awards

      AAG Globe Book Award
      AAG Meridian Book Award
      John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize

   
History Book Awards

      Albert C. Outler Prize
      Albert J. Beveridge Award
      Ambassador Book Award in American Studies
      Bancroft Prize
      Dunning Prize
      Edelstein Prize
      Francis Parkman Prize
      Frederick Douglass Book Prize
      Frederick Jackson Turner Award
      George Perkins Marsh Prize
      Gladstone Book Prize
      Hessell-Tiltman History Prize
      James S. Donnelly Prize
      Koret Jewish Book Award for History
      Liberty Legacy Foundation Award
      Lincoln Prize
      Merle Curti Award
      Philip Schaff Prize
      Philip Taft Labor History Book Award
      Pulitzer Prize for History
      Ralph Waldo Emerson Award
      Sally Hacker Prize
      Samuel Pepys Award
      Saul Viener Book Prize
      Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize
      Whitfield Book Prize
      Wolfson History Prize
      Wolfson Oeuvre Prize

   
Horror Book Awards

      Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement

   
Humor Book Awards

      Bad Sex in Fiction Award
      Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize
      Bookseller Diagram Prize
      Mark Twain Prize for American Humor
      Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour
      Thurber Prize for American Humor

   
Jewish Book Awards

      Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction
      Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards
      Koret Jewish Book Award for Biography, Autobiography, and Literary Studies
      Koret Jewish Book Award for Fiction
      Koret Jewish Book Award for History
      Koret Jewish Book Award for Philosophy and Thought
      National Jewish Book Awards
      Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction
      Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature
      Saul Viener Book Prize
      Sophie Brody Medal
      Wingate Literary Prize

   
Legal History and Scholarship Book Awards

      Coif Book Award
      Herbert Jacob Book Prize
      Langum Prize for Legal History
      Scribes Book Award
      Willard Hurst Prize

   
Literary History and Criticism Book Awards

      Christian Gauss Award
      Harry Levin Prize
      Jacques Barzun Prize
      Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture
      MLA Prize for a First Book
      National Book Critics Circle General Criticism Award
      René Wellek Prize
      Robert Motherwell Book Award
      Warren-Brooks Award

   
Literature Book Awards

      Ambassador Book Award in Arts and Letters
      Asian American Literary Award
      Cervantes Prize
      Cheltenham Prize for Literature
      City of Regina Book Award
      City of Saskatoon Award
      Commonwealth Writers' Best Book Prize
      Commonwealth Writers' Best First Book Prize
      Costa (Whitebread) Book of the Year
      David Cohen Prize
      Drue Heinz Literature Prize
      Firecracker Alternative Book Awards for Fiction
      Golden Pen Award
      Grant MacEwan Author's Award
      Guardian First Book Award
      Hawthornden Prize
      Jerusalem Prize
      John Llewellyn Rhys Prize
      Kiriyama Prize
      Langston Hughes Medal
      Los Angeles Times Poetry Prize
      Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Award
      Marian Engel Award
      McKitterick Prize
      Miles Franklin Award
      Montana Medal for Fiction or Poetry
      Native Writers Circle of the Americas First Book Award for Prose
      Nobel Prize in Literature
      Ondaatje Prize
      Patrick White Award
      Prince of Asturias Award for Letters
      Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction
      Sagittarius Prize
      Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature
      Saskatchewan Book Of The Year Award
      Saskatchewan First Book Award
      Scottish Book of the Year
      Scottish First Book of the Year
      Sidewise Award for Alternate History
      Somerset Maugham Awards
      Sophie Brody Medal
      Strauss Living Award
      Toronto Book Awards
      Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism
      W.O. Mitchell Literary Prize
      Wales Book of the Year Award
      Wellcome Trust Book Prize
      WH Smith Literary Award
      William Dean Howells Medal
      Wingate Literary Prize

   
Music Book Awards

      Alan Merriam Prize
      ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards
      Firecracker Alternative Book Awards for Music
      Irving Lowens Memorial Book Award
      Kurt Weill Book Prize
      Lewis Lockwood Award
      Nicolas Bessaraboff Prize
      Otto Kinkeldey Award
      Woody Guthrie Award

   
Mystery and Thrillers Book Awards

      Arthur Ellis Best First Novel Award
      Arthur Ellis Best Non-fiction Crime Award
      Arthur Ellis Best Novel Award
      Edgar Allan Poe Best Fact Crime Award
      Edgar Allan Poe Best Novel Award
      Los Angeles Times History Book Prize
      Los Angeles Times Mystery/Thriller Book Prize

   
Nature and Outdoors Book Awards

      Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature
      John Burroughs Medal

   
Non-fiction Book Awards

      Age Non-fiction Award
      Alan Paton Award
      Arthur Ross Book Award
      BCALA Non-Fiction Award
      BCALA Outstanding Contribution Citation
      Charles Taylor Prize
      Edna Staebler Award
      Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award
      Frederic G. Melcher Book Award
      Goethe Prize
      Governor General Non-Fiction
      Herskovits Award
      Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
      Koret Jewish Book Award for Philosophy and Thought
      Lannon Literary Nonfiction Awards
      Melville J. Herskovits Award
      Montana Medal for Non-Fiction
      National Book Award for Nonfiction
      National Book Critics Circle General Non-fiction Award
      Nereus Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize
      New York City Book Awards
      Oregon Literary Nonfiction Award (Frances Fuller Victor and Sarah Winnemucca Awards)
      Ottawa Book Awards English Non-Fiction Category
      PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction
      Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction
      Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
      Robert F. Kennedy Book Award
      Samuel Johnson Prize
      Saskatchewan Non-Fiction Award
      Saskatchewan Scholarly Writing Award

   
Philosophy Book Awards

      APA Book Prize
      Frederic G. Melcher Book Award
      Koret Jewish Book Award for Philosophy and Thought
      Lakatos Award in Philosophy of Science
      Ralph Waldo Emerson Award

   
Photography Book Awards

      CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography
      European Publishers Award for Photography
      Firecracker Alternative Book Awards for Art and Photography
      Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards

   
Poetry Book Awards

      Ambassador Book Award in Poetry
      APR/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry
      Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
      Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry
      Bollingen Prize for Poetry
      Brittingham Prize in Poetry
      Costa (Whitebread) Poetry Award
      Dinny O'Hearn Poetry Prize
      Firecracker Alternative Book Awards for Poetry
      Forward Best Collection Poetry Prize
      Governor General Poetry
      Griffin Poetry Prize
      Harold Morton Landon Translation Award
      James Laughlin Award
      Kate Tufts Discovery Award
      Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
      Lampman-Scott Award
      Lannon Literary Poetry Awards
      Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
      Los Angeles Times Science and Technology Book Prize
      Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry
      National Book Award for Poetry
      National Book Critics Circle Poetry Award
      Native Writers Circle of the Americas First Book Award for Poetry
      Pat Lowther Award
      Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
      Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry
      Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
      Saskatchewan Poetry Award
      T. S. Eliot Prize
      Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry
      Wallace Stevens Award
      Walt Whitman Award

   
Politics Book Awards

      Deutscher Memorial Prize
      Eli M. Oboler Memorial Award
      Firecracker Alternative Book Awards for Politics
      Gladys M. Kammerer Award
      Herbert A. Simon Book Award
      Lionel Gelber Prize
      Michael Harrington Award
      Orwell Prize
      Ralph Bunche Award
      Shaughnessy Cohen Award for Political Writing
      Spitz Prize
      Tankard Book Award
      Victoria Schuck Award

   
Romance Book Awards

      Romantic Novel of the Year Award

   
Science Book Awards

      Abraham Pais Prize
      Lakatos Award in Philosophy of Science
      Los Angeles Times Science and Technology Book Prize
      Ludwik Fleck Prize
      Royal Society (Aventis) Prize for Science Books
      Walter P. Kistler Book Award
      Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize

   
SciFi and Fantasy Book Awards

      Andre Norton Award
      Arthur C. Clarke Award
      August Derleth Award
      Compton Crook Award
      Hugo Award
      John W. Campbell Memorial Award
      Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature
      Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children's Literature
      Nebula Award
      Philip K. Dick Award
      Prometheus Best Novel Award
      Prometheus Hall of Fame Award
      World Fantasy Award for Novel

   
Short Stories Book Awards

      Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award
      H.L. Davis Award for Short Fiction
      Rea Award
      Story Prize

   
Social Sciences Book Awards

      AHS Book Award
      Alan Merriam Prize
      ASA Distinguished Book Award
      Chicago Folklore Prize
      Eileen Basker Memorial Prize
      Harold Adams Innis Prize
      James S. Donnelly Prize
      Leeds Award in Urban Anthropology
      NASSS Outstanding Book Award
      Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award
      Ruth Benedict Prize
      SSSR Distinguished Book Award

   
Sports Book Awards

      Casey Award
      Dave Moore Award
      Herbert Warren Wind Book Award
      NASSS Outstanding Book Award
      William Hill Sports Book of the Year

   
Teens Book Awards

      Alex Awards
      Arthur Ellis Best Juvenile Crime Award
      Booktrust Teenage Prize
      Michael L. Printz Award
      National Book Award for Young People's Literature
      Sequoyah Young Adult

   
Translation Book Awards

      Corneliu M Popescu Prize
      Harold Morton Landon Translation Award
      Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize
      John Florio Prize
      Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation
      Mildred L. Batchelder Award
      National Book Award in Translation
      PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
      Rossica Translation Prize
      Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize
      Scott Moncrieff Prize
      Vondel Prize

   
Women's Studies Book Awards

      Joan Kelly Memorial Prize
      Society for the Study of Early Modern Women Book Award
      Victoria Schuck Award


Book Award News

2/28/2010 permalink

Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award to D. A. Powell
Graywolf Press
D. A. Powell has won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for fourth collection of poetry, Chronic, published by Graywolf Press. The Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award is given annually by Claremont Graduate University to honor work by a midcareer poet. The panel of final judges for the 2010 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awards were Ted Genoways, Linda Gregerson, Paul Muldoon, Carl Phillips, and Charles Harper Webb. "D. A. Powell is one of the major poets of our time, and it’s wonderful to have the Kingsley Tufts Award recognize that", announced Graywolf Press senior editor Jeffrey Shotts. "Considering that Powell was selected by such a diverse committee of esteemed poets, that makes it all the sweeter."

[dogs and boys can treat you like trash. and dogs do love trash]

dogs and boys can treat you like trash.   and dogs do love trash
to nuzzle their muzzles.    they slather with tongues that smell like their nuts

but the boys are fickle when they lick you.  they stick you with twigs
and roll you over like roaches.    then off with another:  those sluts

with their asses so tight you couldn't get them to budge for a turd
so unlike the dogs:  who will turn in a circle showing & showing their butts

a dog on a leash:  a friend in the world.  he'll crawl into bed on all fours
and curl up at your toes.    he'll give you his nose.    he'll slobber on cuts

a dog is not fragile; he's fixed.    but a boy:  cannot give you his love
he closes his eyes to your kisses.    he hisses.    a boy is a putz

with a sponge for a brain.   and a mop for a heart:  he'll soak up your love
if you let him and leave you as dry as a cork.     he'll punch out your guts

when a boy goes away:  to another boy's arms.    what else can you do
but lie down with the dogs.   with the hounds with the curs.    with the mutts

- a poem by D. A. Powell published in the Boston Review.


Chronic: Poems by D. A. Powell
list Price: $20.00 our price: $13.53
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2/5/2010 permalink

Of course, I’d forgotten she’d died: An extract from A Scattering by Christopher Reid, the 2009 Costa Book of the Year
Arete
"My old, obscure life has gone. I am sort of famous. Radios have been broadcasting, and newspapers have retailed, in their different styles, the story of my book: a set of elegies on the death from cancer of my wife in 2005. What began as an intimate expression of love and grief has become a public parade. Bewildering. How did Douglas Dunn, whose Elegies, poems about the death of his first wife, in 1985 won the first Whitbread Book of the Year — the Whitbread preceded and developed into the Costa — cope with this? Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters, also and perhaps not coincidentally about his dead wife, Sylvia Plath, was a later winner. Hughes had died by the time of his award: the ultimate evasive action. No local radio interviews for him!" - from Christopher Reid on winning the Costa Award.

Late home one night, I found
she was not yet home herself.
So I got into bed and waited
under my blanket mound,
until I heard her come in
and hurry upstairs.
My back was to the door.
Without turning round,
I greeted her, but my voice
made only a hollow, parched-throated
k-, k-, k- sound,
which I could not convert into words
and which, anyway, lacked
the force to carry.
Nonplussed, but not distraught,
I listened to her undress,
then sidle along the far side
of our bed and lift the covers.
Of course, I’d forgotten she’d died.
Adjusting my arm for the usual
cuddle and caress,
I felt mattress and bedboards
welcome her weight
as she rolled and settled towards me,
but, before I caught her,
it was already too late
and she’d wisped clean away.
from A Scattering, by Christopher Reid.


A Scattering by Christopher Reid
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12/19/2009 permalink

The wedding guests look upon the cracked, pink lips of Rosie's bridegroom - an extract from Petina Gappah's An Elegy for Easterly, the 2009 Guardian First Book Award
Faber & Faber
A "rising star of Zimbabwean literature" according noble laureate to J. M. Coetzee, Petina Gappah writes (in her own words) "about ordinary people living in a situation rendered extraordinary because of politics. I hope the stories tell you something about the Zimbabwean character", she says, "the resilience, the tenacity, the humour. The desire to survive."

An excerpt from An Elegy for Easterly, the 2009 Guardian First Book Award winning book by Petina Gappah.

The wedding guests look upon the cracked, pink lips of Rosie's bridegroom. They look at Rosie's own lips that owe their reddish pinkness to artifice, they think, and not disease. Can Rosie see what they see, they wonder, that her newly made husband's sickness screams out its presence from every pore? Disease flourishes in the slipperiness of his tufted hair, it is alive in the darkening skin, in the whites of the eyes whiter than nature intended, in the violently pink-red lips, the blood beneath fighting to erupt through the broken skin. He smiles often, Rosie's bridegroom. He smiles when a drunken aunt entertains the guests with a dance that, oustide this celebration of sanctioned fornication, could be called obscene. He smiles when an uncle based in Manchester, England, calls on the mobile telephone of his son and sends his congratulations across nine thousand kilometres shortened by Vodafone on his end and Econet on the other. His smile broadens as the son tells the master of ceremonies that the uncle pledges two hundred pounds as a wedding gift; the smile becomes broader still when the master of ceremonies announces that the gift is worth two hundred million dollars on Harare's parallel market. He smiles and smiles and smiles and his smile reveals the heightened colour of his gums.. - from An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah


An Elegy for Easterly: Stories by Petina Gappah
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11/22/2009 permalink

Those who saw him hushed: Let the Great World Spin, the National Book Award winner by Colum McCann
Random House
"There's hardly a line in the novel about 9/11, but it's everywhere if the reader wants it to be", said Colum McCann speaking about Let the Great World Spin, the book which won the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction. Set around Philippe Petit's 1974 World Trade Center tightrope walk, Let the Great World Spin is an allegorical story inspired by 9/11, "a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s." A short excerpt:

Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some thought at first that it must have been a trick of the light, something to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall. Others figured it might be the perfect city joke–stand around and point upward, until people gathered, tilted their heads, nodded, affirmed, until all were staring upward at nothing at all, like waiting for the end of a Lenny Bruce gag. But the longer they watched, the surer they were. He stood at the very edge of the building, shaped dark against the gray of the morning. A window washer maybe. Or a construction worker. Or a jumper.

Up there, at the height of a hundred and ten stories, utterly still, a dark toy against the cloudy sky.

He could only be seen at certain angles so that the watchers had to pause at street corners, find a gap between buildings, or meander from the shadows to get a view unobstructed by cornicework, gargoyles, balustrades, roof edges. None of them had yet made sense of the line strung at his feet from one tower to the other. Rather, it was the manshape that held them there, their necks craned, torn between the promise of doom and the disappointment of the ordinary. It was the dilemma of the watchers: they didn’t want to wait around for nothing at all, some idiot standing on the precipice of the towers, but they didn’t want to miss the moment either, if he slipped, or got arrested, or dove, arms stretched.
- an excerpt from Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann


Let the Great World Spin: A Novel by Colum McCann
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10/21/2009 permalink

Four Canadians tortured in the name of fighting Terror, Kerry Pither wins Ottawa Book Award for Dark Days
Penguin Books Canada
Dark Days tells the story of a Canadian national security investigation gone wrong through the eyes of four of its targets: Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki, Maher Arar and Muayyed Nureddin. The book chronicles how all four men were accused of terrorist links, detained overseas and subjected to brutal torture while being interrogated with questions from Canadian agencies. No evidence was ever produced to back the allegations against them and all were eventually released and returned to Canada.

"Most Canadians know about Maher Arar, but few know the extent to which there was a pattern behind his case -- that what happened to him happened to at least three other Canadians too," said Pither.

"All of these men are still working for justice, to clear their names and move on with their lives. For Arar, it's waiting for the Obama administration to accept responsibilty for its role and clear his name, and for El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin it's about waiting for an apology from the Canadian government for its role in their ordeals," said Pither. "And for all of us, it's about ensuring the changes are made to stop this from happening again." - from the Dark Days Book Launch

The lock slid open and the door swung into the cell. Ahmad had to jump out of the way. The guard ordered him out and led him back upstairs into a room, where he tied a piece of rubber over his eyes.

Then the interrogation started. Someone said they’d received information about him and read out the names and addresses of his family in Toronto, the make and colour of his car, and its licence plate number. They knew his address, the man said, and read it out to him. He had the wrong apartment number, so Ahmad corrected him.

Then the beating started. Ahmad was punched in the face and kicked at. The men in the room screamed insults at him, his family, and his faith.

One of the interrogators leaned in and told Ahmad that they were going to bring Rola, the woman he’d been going to Damascus to marry, in and rape her, there, in front of him.

Ahmad was terrified — did they have Rola? He knew this kind of thing happened in Syria. He pleaded with them, saying that he had told them the truth.

“No,” the man yelled. “We need to hear something new!”

“I can’t invent something,” said Ahmad.

“No,” the man replied. “You can invent something.

Then things got worse. Ahmad was ordered to strip down to his shorts and lie on his stomach on the floor. In pain from the beating, he moved slowly. The men yelled at him to move faster as he struggled out of his shirt and pants. When Ahmad was lying down, the men grabbed his hands and handcuffed them behind his back, then lifted his feet up and tied his wrists to his ankles with a rope. He was like a sheep ready for slaughter, Ahmad says.

Ice water was poured all over his body, then he was whipped on his feet, legs, knees, and back with a thick metal cable. The pain was sharp and fierce, but the first strokes were the worst. After a few lashings, Ahmad’s feet and legs went numb, but that was what the dousing with ice water was for – to bring the feeling back. He could see the interrogators’ shoes from under the blindfold. The ones without the cable kicked him in the face and his back and legs.

Ahmad begged the men to stop, asking why they were doing this to him. They just laughed. “They were asking me to repeat my story, and I kept repeating what happened, and they said, ‘That’s not what we want to hear.’ They kept threatening me and mocking me and said they were going to inflict permanent injury – they said I wouldn’t be able to have kids later on.”

Ahmad lost track of how often he was taken down to his cell and back up for more torture but remembers that eventually he couldn’t walk and had to be dragged up and down the stairs. In his cell, without the blindfold, he saw his legs were covered in blood. His feet were too swollen to fit into his shoes.

“After I just couldn’t take it any more, I told them, ‘I’m willing to say whatever you want me to say,’” Ahmad recalls.

The men asked him about people he knew in Canada – including Abdullah Almalki and Maher Arar.
- excerpted from Dark Days: The Story of Four Canadians Tortured in the Name of Fighting Terror by Kerry Pither (read a longer excerpt at kerrypither.com).


Dark Days: The Story of Four Canadians Tortured in the Name of Fighting Terror by Kerry Pither
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10/10/2009 permalink

I've had to learn to live by writing, not the other way round. Herta Müller wins Nobel Prize in Literature
Univ of Nebraska Pr
I've had to learn to live by writing, not the other way round. I wanted to live by the standards I dreamt of, it's as simple as that. And writing was a way for me to voice what I could not actually live. - Herta Müller speaking to an unidentified journalist.

She is an excellent author with truly fantastic language, on the one hand. On the other she has the capacity of really giving you a sense of what it's like living in a dictatorship, also what it's like to be part of a minority in another country and what it's like to be an exile. She is talking about really big issues like that. - Peter Englund, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, speaking about Herta Müller following the announcement that she had won 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The cemetery was made of rocks. There were boulders on the graves.

When I looked down on the ground I noticed that the soles of my shoes were turned up. All that time, I had been walking on my shoelaces. Long and heavy, they were lying behind me, their ends curled up.

Two staggering little men were lifting the coffin from the hearse and lowering it into the grave with two tattered ropes. The coffin was swinging. Their arms and their ropes got longer and longer. The grave was filled with water despite the drought. Your father killed a lot of people, one of the drunk little men said.

I said: he was in the war. For every twenty-five killed he got a medal. He brought home several medals.

He raped a woman in a turnip field, the little man said. Together with four other soldiers. Your father stuck a turnip between her legs. When we left she was bleeding. She was Russian. For weeks afterwards, we would call all weapons turnips.

It was late fall, the little man said. The turnip leaves were black and folded over by frost. Then the little man put a big rock on the coffin.

The other drunk little man continued:

For the New Year, we went to the opera in a small German town. The singer's voice was as piercing as the Russian woman's screams. One after the other, we left the theater. Your father stayed till the end. For weeks afterwards, he called all songs turnips and all women turnips.


- an excerpt from The Funeral Sermon, the first story in Herta Müller's first book, Nadirs (Niederungen, 1982). Click here to read The Funeral Sermon in its entirety.


Nadirs (European Women Writers) by Herta Müller
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9/23/2009 permalink

I knew I had no hope of winning: Simon Van Booy wins Frank O'Connor Short Story Award for Love Begins in Winter
Harper Perennial
"I was very nervous coming to Cork for the Frank O'Connor Festival," Simon Van Booy said in his awards ceremony acceptance speech at Cork last week. "But I stopped being nervous when I read the other short-listed books. I was shocked by the quality of the work, and I knew I had no hope of winning." Nevertheless, the 34 year old London born author took home the €35,000 prize, the richest in the world for a short story collection.

"Simon Van Booy's stories in Love Begins in Winter are as immediate and elusive as the dreams they resemble. Marked by an intense inwardness, their characters' lives intersect and evolve in constantly surprising ways, carried forward by a prose as melodious and continuous as one of the Bach Cello Suites played by the narrator of the title story." -- John Koethe, author of Ninety-Fifth Street and Sally's Hair

I wait in the shadows.

My cello is already on stage. It was carved in 1723 on a Sicilian hillside where the sea is very quiet. The strings vibrate when the bow is near, as though anticipating their lover.

My name is Bruno Bonnet. The curtain I stand behind is the color of a plum. The velvet is heavy. My life is on the other side. Sometimes I wish it would continue on without me.

The stage lights here in Quebec City are too bright. Stars of dust circle the scroll and the pegs as I am introduced in French-Canadian. The cello belonged to my grandfather who was accidentally killed in World War II.

My grandfather's kitchen chair is also on stage. I can only put weight on three legs. The wicker at the center of the seat is ripped. One day it's going to collapse. When the chair arrives at the concert hall a day or so before a performance, a frantic music director will call with bad news: 'my chair has been utterly ruined in transit.'

An eruption of applause and I take the stage.

Who are all these people?

One day I will play without my instrument. I will sit up straight and not move. I will close my eyes and imagine life taking place in the houses outside the concert hall: steaming pots stirred by women in slippers; teenagers in their rooms wearing headphones; somebody's son looking for his keys; a divorcee brushing her teeth as her cat stares; a family watching television—the youngest is asleep but will not remember his dream.

When I clasp my bow, the audience is suddenly very quiet.

I look out at their faces a moment before I begin.

So many people and yet not one single person who knows anything about me.
- from Love Begins in Winter by Simon Van Booy


Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories (P.S.) by Simon Van Booy
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9/15/2009 permalink

I saw my soul become flesh: Jean Valentine wins Wallace Stevens Award
Wesleyan
I saw my soul become flesh     breaking open
the linseed oil breaking over the paper
running down     pouring
no one to catch it     my life breaking open
no one to contain it     my
pelvis thinning out into God


- Annunciation by Jean Valentine from Door in the Mountain.

The Academy of American Poets has selected Jean Valentine as the 2009 recipient Wallace Stevens Award. The $100,000 prize recognizes "outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry".

Looking into a Jean Valentine poem is like looking into a lake: you can see your own outline, and the shapes of the upper world, reflected among rocks, underwater life, glint of lost bottles, drifted leaves. The known and familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where consciousness and the subliminal meet. This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way. - Adrienne Rich

Red cloth
I lie on the ground
otherwise nothing could hold

I put my hand on the ground
the membrane is gone
and nothing does hold

your place in the ground
is all of it
and it is breathing


- Red cloth by Jean Valentine.Originally published in The Nation.


Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003 (Wesleyan Poetry) by Jean Valentine
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7/5/2009 permalink

Philip Hoare wins 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for Leviathan
Fourth Estate
Nothing else represents life on such a scale. Seeing a whale is not like seeing a sparrow in a city tree, or a cat crossing the street. It is not even like seeing a giraffe, dawdling on the African veldt, batting its glamorous eyes in the dust. - from Leviathan by Philip Hoare, winner of the £20,000 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction .

"The quality of his writing was just so impressive", stated Jacob Weisberg, chairman of judges, "it is literary, just beautiful. It is a model of a certain kind of writing and I imagine it is a book that will be read for a long time to come."

Whales exist beyond the normal, beyond what we expect to see in our daily lives. They are not so much animal as geographical; if they did not move it would be difficult to believe they were alive at all. In their size – their very construction – they are antidotes to our lives lived in uncompromising cities. Perhaps that's why I was so affected seeing them at this point in my life: I was ready to witness whales, to believe in them. I had come looking for something, and I had found it. - from Leviathan by Philip Hoare.


Leviathan by Philip Hoare
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6/24/2009 permalink

R. Bruce Elder wins 2009 Robert Motherwell Book Award
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Author, filmaker and critic R. Bruce Elder has won the Robert Motherwell Book Award for his book Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century. The Robert Motherwell Book Award honors an outstanding publication in the history and criticism of modernism.

"A remarkably ambitious, wide-ranging, and thoroughly researched study that opens new perspectives on the development of modernism and on the central role of cinema in that development" said award committee. "His most original book" according to P. Adams Sitney. Elder "makes a convincing case for the centrality of cinema as a unique mode of inspired cognition in the wake of the revolutionary art movements of the 1910s and 1920s. His learned investigation of the mystical heritage informing even the most dogmatically rationalist areas of modernist art and polemics puts the work of Richter, Eggeling, and Eisenstein in a thoroughly new and dazzling light."

Fedorov’s belief in the aesthetic transformation of humanity led him to consider a question that would play a large role in art theories in early twentieth-century Russia: How could new bodies be created that would be suited for the future world? Art, Fedorov argued, lies at the intersection of material and ideal reality, so it is able to transfigure the human body. Science will resurrect the bodies of the departed, Fedorov predicted, but art will restructure them. A principal concern of Fedorov was how to bring forth a blissful collective organism. His solution: The body’s earthly constitution would have to be fundamentally changed. Cosmic nutritional substances would be invented, along with new organs for digestion. Cosmic transmutations of the body would then occur that left behind the body’s zoomorphous nature as it developed vegetative organs. These new vegetative organs would make the body capable of feeding on and accumulating the all-pervading cosmic substance—that is, light (just as plants are nourished through photosynthesis). The flesh body would be converted into a photosynthesizing biomass that would flourish in the light and warmth of special greenhouses in outer space. This new body would make sunshine (and light generally) a primary economic resource, one that could be consumed and reproduced by the new human organism. The worker and the machine that produced the cosmic resource (light) would in time fuse into one entity. - from chapter 6: Eisenstein, Constructivism, and the Dialectic of Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century by R. Bruce Elder.


Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century (Film and Media Studies) by R. Bruce Elder
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