G&A: The Contest Blog

In this ongoing series, we talk to prize recipients about the ways in which winning literary awards has affected their work and writing life, what they’ve learned from winning, and what advice they might offer to writers applying for awards.

This installment features an interview with fiction writer Daniel Alarcón, author of the short story collection War by Candlelight (Harper, 2006), which was a finalist for the PEN-Hemingway Award, and Lost City Radio (Harper, 2007), which was named a Best Novel of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post, and won the 2009 International Literature Prize given by the House of World Culture in Berlin. Alarcón received the prestigious Whiting Award for fiction in 2004, and was named one of the New Yorker’s 20 under 40 in 2010. He is the associate editor of Etiqueta Negra, a literary quarterly published in his native Lima, Peru; the founder of Radio Ambulante, a Spanish-language storytelling podcast; and a contributing editor of Granta. His two forthcoming books—a novel, At Night We Walk in Circles, and a short story collection, The King Is Always Above The People—will be published by Riverhead Books in the fall of 2013 and 2014, respectively. Alarcón discusses how winning literary prizes has at times allowed him to write full-time and pay the bills, and has motivated him to keep writing.

Has winning literary prizes such as the Whiting Award changed your career? Were you able to put the prize money toward something specific, or did you make any important connections as a result of winning?

Winning prizes is nice, and yes, it has changed my career for the better, even before I realized I had “a career,” per se. The Whiting Award came before my first book had even been published, so it felt like an absurd and undeserved bit of good luck; but I can’t deny that it gave me some confidence to keep working. The piece the judges read was the opening fifty pages of my second book, Lost City Radio, and winning gave me some validation to push forward when I really had no idea what I was doing. By luck or coincidence, awards in my case have tended to come at key moments, just when I needed them to lift my spirits, to remind me that someone was reading, that someone appreciated what I was trying to do. As for the money, yeah, that helps too, but it never lasts. I’ve spent it all by now, but it kept me clothed and fed, the rent paid, at critical junctures. I feel like I should state the obvious: in many cases, this prize money isn’t extra money; it’s the only money. You might not have any other income for six months or a year. Economically, writing is a high-wire act (try getting a home loan as a self-employed novelist) and that’s not going to change unless something crazy happens. Prize money has meant the difference between having to work a real job and enjoying the luxury of writing full-time, or close to full-time. Prize money means being able to turn down teaching jobs. The money I’ve won was never used to go on vacation (I haven’t had one of those in years) or to start a restaurant or buy an Audi. I used it to pay rent and live, which sounds mundane, but there it is.

But sometimes winning isn’t everything. I first met Junot Díaz when we were both finalists for an award (which he won, naturally) and we’ve been friendly since. He’s a writer I’d always admired, and the “prize” at that point was meeting him, sharing a drink, and—crucially—beginning to think of myself as a colleague of writers of that caliber. I was a finalist for [the PEN-Hemingway Award for debut fiction] in 2006, which Yiyun Li won, and the more I’ve read of her work, the more I admire her and the prouder I am to have been a finalist alongside such a talent.

Has receiving awards, or being selected as a finalist, had an effect on the decisions you've made as a writer, or on the path you have chosen to take in your work?

No, not really. I’ve written stories, began and tossed out novels, tried my hand at narrative nonfiction, political reportage, investigative reporting, theater, graphic novels, and now radio storytelling in Spanish—and always done it according to whimsy. I do the things I like doing, and I realize this means I’m very fortunate. Maybe winning prizes has helped, I don’t know. Maybe certain editors will respond to my emails because they know they’ve heard my name somewhere, but you’d have to ask them about that.

What advice could you offer for writers looking to contests as a way to get their work into the world?

Contests have their place, and nowadays, when I serve as a judge, I try to read with the same openness, optimism, and excitement that I had when I was a younger writer, putting my work out there for the first time. I was jury member for the Aura Estrada Prize last year, and it was a real honor. I knew Aura, and there could be no better memorial for someone of her vision and potential than a prize like this one. I read those manuscripts and kept looking for something dynamic, something beautiful, something full of the same hope that is implicit in any sincere artistic pursuit. Most manuscripts didn’t pass muster, didn’t seem good enough to earn a prize with Aura’s name, but then I found it. When one voice managed to push through the clutter, it was incredibly exciting. The writer’s name was Majo Rodríguez. Look for her. That’s what prizes and contests can do. They put a writer on the map.

For more information on the work of Daniel Alarcón, visit his website at danielalarcon.com. On February 5 in New York City, Radio Ambulante will host a Benefit Evening of Latin American Storytelling featuring Alarcón, Junot Díaz, and Francisco Goldman, at 7:00 PM at the Instituto Cervantes at 211 E. 49th Street.

The Chicago Tribune is currently accepting submissions for its annual Nelson Algren Short Story Award. One winner will receive $3,500 and publication in Printers Row Journal, the Tribune’s weekly literary supplement. Three finalists will receive awards of $1,000 each, and four runners-up will receive $500 each. The deadline is February 1.

United States residents ages eighteen and over are eligible to enter. Using the online submissions system, fiction writers may submit a previously unpublished story, written in English, of up to eight thousand words. There is no entry fee. Winners will be selected by a panel of established fiction writers and announced during the annual Printers Row Lit Fest, which will be held this year on June 8 and 9 in Chicago. 

Given annually for over twenty years, the Nelson Algren Award is named for the iconic Chicago writer best known for his novel The Man With the Golden Arm, which received the inaugural National Book Award in 1949. “Fiction helps us make sense of a world in which horrible things happen,” writes Tribune Literary Editor Elizabeth Taylor on the newspaper’s website. “This is a world that all but defies imagination, where lovers and friends, criminals and victims, enemies and allies, traitors and confidantes engage with each other on the page, and elevate the everyday of life into art. In the Nelson Algren contest, we try to create a perfect world, in which all stories are treated equally.” The contest, which is judged blindly, has published early work from authors such as Louise Erdrich and Julia Glass. Past judges have included late authors George Plimpton, Studs Terkel, and Eudora Welty.  

The winner of the 2012 prize was Jeremy T. Wilson of Chicago for his story “Everything is Going to Be Okay.” For complete eligibility requirements and guidelines for the 2013 contest, visit the Nelson Algren Award rules page.

The finalists for the 2012 Story Prize, an annual book award given for a short story collection published during the previous year, were announced this morning. The winner, who will be chosen in March, will receive twenty thousand dollars.

The 2012 finalists are Dan Chaon for Stay Awake (Ballantine), Junot Díaz for This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead), and Claire Vaye Watkins for Battleborn (Riverhead). The collections were chosen from ninety-eight submissions, representing sixty-five different publishers.

Dan Chaon is the author of two previous books, including the collection Among the Missing (Ballantine), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Junot Díaz’s second book, the novel The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead) won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Claire Vaye Watkins has received a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame and earned a spot on the National Book Foundation’s  2012 “5 Under 35” list. Battleborn is her debut collection. 

“These are all outstanding short story collections by skillful and accomplished authors, whom we're thrilled to have as finalists for The Story Prize,” wrote Director Larry Dark on the Prize blog.

The judges for this year’s prize include critic and writer Jane Ciabattari, author Yiyun Li, and bookseller Sarah McNally. The winner will be announced on March 13 at an annual award ceremony and reading at the New School in New York City.

Founded in 2004, The Story Prize is dedicated to the short story, a form often overlooked among major literary prizes. The 2011 award went to Steven Millhauser for his collection We Others (Knopf). 

The finalists for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced today. Of the thirty finalists, one winner in each of the six categories will be selected this February to receive the prestigious literary prize. 

The finalists in poetry are David Ferry for Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press), Lucia Perillo for On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon Press), Allan Peterson for Fragile Acts (McSweeney’s Books), D. A. Powell for Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf Press), and A. E. Stallings for Olives (Triquarterly).

The finalists in fiction are Laurent Binet for HHhH, translated by Sam Taylor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Ben Fountain for Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ecco), Adam Johnson for The Orphan Master’s Son (Random House), Lydia Millet for Magnificence (W. W. Norton), and Zadie Smith for NW (Penguin Press).

The finalists in autobiography are Reyna Grande for The Distance Between Us (Atria Books), Maureen N. McLane for My Poets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the late Anthony Shadid for House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Leanne Shapton for Swimming Studies (Blue Rider Press), and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o for In the House of the Interpreter (Pantheon).

For a complete list of finalists, including those in the additional categories of general nonfiction, biography, and criticism, and for profiles of each author, visit the National Book Critics Circle Tumblr page or the official blog of the NBCC, Critical Mass.

The National Book Critics Circle Awards—the only national prizes selected by a panel of established literary critics—have been given annually since 1976 for books published in the United States in the previous year. The NBCC also honors one of its member critics with the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and awards the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award for a distinguished author, editor, publisher, or literary institution, each year.

The winners of the 2012 awards will be announced on Thursday, February 28 at a ceremony at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium in New York City. A finalists reading will be held on February 27. 

The Hong Kong-based Man Asian Literary Prize has announced the shortlist for its 2012 prize. Of the five finalists, culled from an original long list of fifteen, one winner will receive an award of thirty thousand dollars.  

The shortlisted finalists include: Musharraf Ali Farooqi of Pakistan for Between Clay and Dust (Aleph), Hiromi Kawakami of Japan for The Briefcase (Counterpoint Press), Orhan Pamuk of Turkey for Silent House (Knopf), Tan Twan Eng of Malaysia for The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books), and Jeet Thayil of India for Narcopolis (Faber and Faber).

The chair of judges, international journalist and cultural critic Maya Jaggi, selected the shortlist along with her fellow judges, Vietnamese American novelist Monique Truong and Indian novelist Vikram Chandra. The winner will be announced on March 14 at the prize ceremony in Hong Kong.

The international award is given annually for a novel by an Asian writer, written in or translated into English and published during the previous year. For more information, visit the Man Asian Literary Prize online.

In the video below, David Parker, executive director of the prize, announces the shortlist, and Maya Jaggi is interviewed about the final five selections.

The Minneapolis-based publisher Milkweed Editions is currently accepting submissions for the second annual Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry. The prize, open to poets who live in the upper Midwest, offers an award of $10,000 and publication for a poetry collection. The deadline is January 31.

Poets who currently reside in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, or Wisconsin are eligible to submit a previously unpublished, book-length poetry manuscript by postal mail. There is no entry fee. Five finalists will be selected by the editors of Milkweed Editions, and the winner will be chosen by this year’s judge, poet G. C. Waldrep, whose most recent book is Archicembalo (Tupelo Press, 2009). Visit the Milkweed website for complete eligibility and submissions guidelines.

Founded in 1980, Milkweed Editions is an independent press whose mission is to “identify, nurture, and publish transformative literature, and build an engaged community around it.” The partnership between Milkweed Editions and the Minneapolis-based law offices of Lindquist & Vennum “celebrates poets for their artistic contributions, and brings outstanding regional writers to a national stage.” 

The inaugural Lindquist & Vennum Prize, judged by poet Peter Campion (The Lions, University of Chicago Press, 2009), was awarded in 2012 to Patricia Kirkpatrick of St. Paul for her collection Odessa. To hear Kirkpatrick read three poems from her winning collection, published this past December by Milkweed Editions, visit our podcast page or click on the Soundcloud player below. 

Meridian, the literary journal of the University of Virginia, is currently accepting submissions for its annual Editors’ Prize. Two awards of $1,000 each and publication are given for a poem and a short story. The deadline is January 8.

Emerging writers who have published no more than one full-length book, and who are not current students, staff, faculty, or recent alumni of the University of Virginia, are eligible to enter. Using the online submission system, submit up to four poems totaling no more than ten pages or a story of up to 10,000 words with an eight-dollar entry fee. Writers may submit two entries per genre, and all entrants receive an electronic subscription to Meridian. Winners will be announced in late March. 

Founded in 1998 in conjunction with the MFA program at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Meridian is published twice yearly, and has featured such writers such as Richard Bausch, Ann Beattie, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Rita Dove, Seamus Heaney, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Charles Wright. The 2012 Editors’ Prize winners were poet Laura Davenport for “Apology for a Horse” and fiction writer Janet Hilliard-Osborn for “Easter, 1954.” Both winning works were published in the May 2012 issue of Meridian. In addition to the annual prize, the journal accepts general submissions of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction year-round. 

For more information about Meridian, and for complete submission guidelines, visit the website. 

The Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, presented the inaugural “Tell it Slant” award to poet Kay Ryan earlier this month, during a two-day celebration of Emily Dickinson’s birth.

The annual award was established this year by the Emily Dickinson Museum’s Board of Governors in order to honor an individual in any field “whose life work is imbued with the creative spirit of the Amherst poet.” The award takes its name from the well-known Dickinson poem which begins: “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—/ Success in Circuit lies / Too bright for our infirm Delight / The Truth's superb surprise.”

Ryan, the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010, published her first book of poetry, Strangely Marked Metal (Copper Beech Press), in 1985. She went on to receive the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004, and her seventh book, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, published in 2010 by Grove Press, received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Grant in 2011.

According to a recent press release from the Dickinson Museum, “Kay Ryan’s style has often been compared to Emily Dickinson’s for its originality and knotted syntax. Dickinson’s poems powerfully convey observations about the natural world, pain and suffering, ecstasy and contentment, and the nature of mortality and immortality. Ryan’s poems are likewise compact, uncluttered, and crackling with wry amusement that belies their density of meaning.” Presenting the award, Gigi Bradford, a member of the Dickinson Museum’s Board of Governors and chair of the Folger Shakespeare Library Poetry Board, said, “Unlike any other poet writing today, Kay Ryan takes Dickinson’s sense of how poetry—sometimes playfully and lightly but always from a slant—helps us to answer the central questions of what it means to be human.”

The award was presented on December 6, a day that marked the 182nd anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s birth. To find out more about the “Tell It Slant” award, and for more information about the Emily Dickinson Museum and Homestead in Amherst, visit emilydickinsonmuseum.org. 

The Hong Kong-based Man Asian Literary Prize recently announced the long list for its 2012 prize. The international award is given annually for a novel by an Asian writer, written in or translated into English and published during the previous year. The winner, who will be announced in March, will receive $30,000.

The list includes Goat Days (Penguin Books India) by Benyamin of India; Between Clay and Dust (Aleph) by Musharraf Ali Farooqi of Pakistan; Another Country (Fourth Estate) by Anjali Joseph of India; The Briefcase (Counterpoint Press) by Hiromi Kawakami of Japan;Thinner Than Skin (HarperCollins Canada) by Uzma Aslam Khan of Pakistan; Ru (Clerkenwell Press) by Kim Thúy of Vietnam and Canada; Black Flower (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) by Young-Ha Kim of South Korea; Island of a Thousand Mirrors (Perera Hussein) by Nayomi Munaweera of Sri Lanka; Silent House (Knopf) by Orhan Pamuk of Turkey; Honour (Viking) by Elif Shafak of Turkey; Northern Girls (Penguin China) by Sheng Keyi of China; The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books) by Tan Twan Eng of Malaysia; The Road To Urbino (Abacus) by Roma Tearne of Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom; Narcopolis (Faber and Faber) by Jeet Thayil of India; and The Bathing Women (Blue Door) by Tie Ning of China.

Thúy and Tearne were eligible this year under the Prize’s new rule regarding writers who have lost their Asian nationality through state action.

In a press release, David Parker, executive director of the prize, said: “This list testifies to the strength and variety of new writing coming out of a culturally emergent Asia. It is full of stories the world hasn’t heard before and which the world needs to hear. It brings together seven books in English translation, which means that, as well as introducing exciting debut novelists, the Prize is also bringing to international attention some best-selling and important writers who are little known outside their own language communities.”

The chair of judges, international journalist and cultural critic Maya Jaggi, is joined by Vietnamese American novelist Monique Truong and award-winning Indian novelist Vikram Chandra.

The fifteen long-listed candidates will be narrowed down to a shortlist on January 9, and the winner will be announced on March 14 at a celebratory dinner in Hong Kong.

Established in 2007, the Man Asian Literary Prize is sponsored by the Man Group, which also oversees the Man Booker Prize for British literature and the Man Booker International Prize. The 2011 winner of the Asian Literary Prize was South Korean writer Kyung-sook Shin for her novel Please Look After Mom (Knopf). She was the first woman and first South Korean writer to win the prize.

Visit the Man Asian Literary Prize website for more information and submission guidelines, and to find out more about the long-listed novelists.

In the video below, watch the longlist announcement from David Parker and a Q&A with Maya Jaggi.