G&A: The Contest Blog

This fall the Brooklyn Film and Arts Festival is sponsoring a contest for stories and essays centered on the most populous borough of New York City. The organization is looking for "compelling Brooklyn stories from writers with a broad range of backgrounds and ages, who can render Brooklyn's rich soul and intangible qualities" using their actual experiences in Kings County as inspiration.

One prose writer, selected by a panel of Brooklyn authors, will receive a prize of four hundred dollars, and the winning piece will be published on the festival website. The winner will also be invited to give a reading at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, near the borough's downtown area.

Story and essay entries, which should range from four to ten pages (up to twenty-five hundred words), should be submitted via e-mail by November 25. There is no entry fee. For more information, visit the Brooklyn Film and Arts Festival blog.

The video below is a trailer for some of last year's festival offerings, featuring shots of Brooklyn past and present.

The 2011 ReLit Awards, celebrating books of poetry and fiction by Canadian authors published with Canadian small presses, were announced last night at the Ottawa International Writers Festival. Presented along with signature rings featuring movable dials of type—a gift that almost didn't come to pass this year due to funding shortages—the awards' focus is on "ideas, not money" (no prize purse accompanies the honor).

The 2011 awards went to poet Dani Couture for Sweet and Craig Francis Power for his novel, Blood Relatives, both published by Toronto-based Pedlar Press. Tony Burgess won for his short story collection Ravenna Gets, from Anvil Press in Vancouver. The winning books were all published in 2010.

There is no entry fee for presses to submit books, which are due at the end of January each year. Visit the ReLit website for submission guidelines.

In the video below, Couture reads three poems from her winning book, including the title piece.

Last night in New York City the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation offered another group of emerging writers what could be a life- and career-altering gift. Since 1985, the foundation has annually offered fifty-thousand-dollar prizes to ten writers whose early work suggests the promise of a flourishing career—Jeffrey Eugenides, Yiyun Li, Jonathan Franzen, Mary Karr, and Terrance Hayes are among the 270 poets, authors, and playwrights to have received the award in the past.

The 2011 Whiting Writers' Award honorees, most of whom have published only one book, are poets Don Mee Choi, Eduardo C. Corral, Shane McCrae, and Kerri Webster; fiction writers Scott Blackwood, Ryan Call, Daniel Orozco, and Teddy Wayne; memoirist Paul Clemens; and playwright Amy Herzog. None of these writers applied for the award; winners are nominated by a group of anonymous literary professionals, which have historically included editors, agents, bookstore owners, and critics.

Poet Mark Doty, who received the Writers' Award in 1994, delivered the prize address, encouraging the winners to "savor this brilliant occasion of attention and celebration" and store it for those inevitable occasions where rejection and self-doubt threaten to define the day.

"May these awards...help you to negotiate with your doubts," he said. "May this award lend you aid and comfort while you move ahead in what I hope will be a long, happy work in service of what is real."

In the video below, Don Mee Choi reads from her book, The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010).

U.K. poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy is among the writers shortlisted for this year's T. S. Eliot Prize, given for a poetry collection published in the United Kingdom. The award, which Duffy received in 2005 for her previous collection, Rapture (Macmillan), has honored international luminaries such as Anne Carson, Mark Doty, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott since its founding in 1993.

The books up for "the most demanding of all poetry prizes," in the words of judge and poet Gillian Clarke, are:
John Burnside's Black Cat Bone (Jonathan Cape), which won the 2011 Forward Prize earlier this month
Carol Ann Duffy's The Bees (Picador)
Leontia Flynn's Profit and Loss (Jonathan Cape)
David Harsent's Night (Faber and Faber)
John Kinsella's Armour (Picador)
Esther Morgan's Grace (Bloodaxe Books)
Daljit Nagra's Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! (Faber and Faber)
Sean O'Brien's November (Picador)
Bernard O'Donoghue's Farmer's Cross (Faber and Faber)
Memorial (Faber and Faber) by Alice Oswald, who won the Eliot Prize in 2002 for Dart (Faber and Faber)

"To me an exciting book is one that makes me want to be a poet—to stop and write a poem at that very moment," says Clarke, who will select the winner with the help of fellow poets Stephen Knight and Dennis O'Driscoll. "All these books are nourishing, exciting, and challenging. Some are more challenging, others more nourishing, but all are tremendously important to us in their different ways—in quiet ways and in pizzazzy ways."

The winner, who will receive a fifteen-thousand-pound prize (approximately twenty-four thousand dollars), will be announced by the Poetry Book Society on January 16. Each finalist will take home one thousand pounds (approximately sixteen hundred dollars).

The Man Booker Prize was awarded last night to British author Julian Barnes, who had been a contender for the honor on three previous occasions. The author, who once called the prize "posh bingo," won this year for his best-selling novel The Sense of an Ending, published earlier this month in the United States by Knopf (the original U.K. publisher is Jonathan Cape).

Barnes, who was a finalist in 1984, 1998, and 2005, says he stands by his earlier assessment of the award as a sort of game whose outcome is dependent on the fluctuating tastes of the judging panel. For shortlisted authors full of "hope and lust and greed and expectation" he suggests treating the award as a lottery—that is, until you win and "realize that the judges are the wisest heads in literary Christendom."

This year's chair of judges, Stella Rimington, whose Booker jury faced criticism earlier this year about its prioritization of accessible books over those of high literary merit, called Barnes's book "very readable, if I may use the word." She added that it has "the markings of a classic of English literature. It is exquisitely written, subtly plotted and reveals new depths with each reading."

Barnes received fifty thousand pounds (approximately seventy-nine thousand dollars). The shortlisted authors each took home twenty-five hundred pounds (approximately thirty-nine thousand dollars).

In the video below, Barnes reacts to his win.

The eighth annual Story Prize, the twenty-thousand-dollar award given for a short story collection, will be judged by an award-winning fiction writer, a translator and international literature scholar, and a memoirist who curates a celebrated reading series.

Sherman Alexie, whose most recent story collection, War Dances (Grove Press, 2009), won the PEN/Faulkner Award, will be joined by Indiana University professor Breon Mitchell, who has translated the fiction of Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, and Franz Kafka, among others. Completing the jury is Louise Steinman, curator of the Los Angeles Public Library's ALOUD reading and conversation series and author of the memoir The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War. The three will select the winner from a trio of finalists chosen by prize director Larry Dark and founder Julie Lindsay.

The Story Prize is still accepting entries of story collections published during the second half of 2011. Submissions must be made by November 15.

Finalists will be announced in January, and the winner announcement will follow an evening of readings and interviews with the finalists in New York City on March 21.

The National Book Foundation (NBF) announced the National Book Award finalists today from Portland on Oregon Public Broadcasting.

The finalists in poetry are:
Nikky Finney for Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press)
Yusef Komunyakaa for The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Carl Phillips for Double Shadow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Adrienne Rich for Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007–2010 (Norton)
Bruce Smith for Devotions (University of Chicago Press)

The finalists in fiction are:
Andrew Krivak for his debut novel, The Sojourn (Bellevue Literary Press)
Téa Obreht, who was honored by the NBF last year as a 5 Under 35 author, for her debut novel, The Tiger's Wife (Random House)
Julie Otsuka for her novel The Buddha in the Attic (Knopf)
Edith Pearlman for her story collection Binocular Vision (Lookout Books)
Jesmyn Ward for her novel Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury)

This year saw the first graphic book finalist, in the nonfiction category: Lauren Redniss's Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout (It Books). The nonfiction shortlist also includes biographies of Malcolm X and Karl and Jenny Marx, as well as Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve (Norton), a look at Lucretius's philosophical poem, "On the Nature of Things."

The National Book Award winners will be announced on November 16 in New York City.

In the video below, Finney reads and discusses the story behind a poem from Head Off & Split.

The Association of German Publishers and Booksellers Foundation (Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels Stiftung) awarded its 2011 German Book Prize on Monday evening just before the start of the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Fifty-seven-year-old author Eugen Ruge won the twenty-five-thousand-euro award (approximately thirty-four thousand dollars) for his first novel, In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts (In times of fading light).

The novel, which received the Alfred Döblin Prize in 2009 when still in manuscript form, was praised for its humor despite the gravity of its subject. "Ruge's family saga is a reflection of East German history," said the prize jury. "He manages to tame the experiences of four generations over fifty years into a dramatically refined composition. His book tells the story of the socialist utopia, the price demanded of the individual, and its gradual extinction."

An English translation of Ruge's novel is in the works, but a firm publication date has not been announced. In the meantime, English speakers can read a translated excerpt on the website Signandsight.

Eighty-year-old Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer was named winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature at an afternoon press conference in Sweden today.

"Because," says permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Peter Englund, "through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality."

Tranströmer, whose profession is psychology, investigates the "big questions," says Englund, such as death, history, memory, and nature, but in a way that does not belittle the human condition, but rather "makes us important."

Translated into sixty languages, Tranströmer's most recent collections published in the United States are The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems (New Directions, 2006) and The Half-Finished Heaven (Graywolf Press, 2001). U.K. publisher Bloodaxe Books released an updated volume of their 1997 translation, New Collected Poems in 2010.

The Nobel has not gone to an author from Sweden since 1974, when Swedish poet Harry Martinson and Swedish novelist Eyvind Johnson shared the award.

The National Book Foundation has announced the latest crop of emerging writers to be recognized with the organization's 5 Under 35 honor.

Nominated by former winners and finalists for the National Book Award, the five young fiction writers will be feted later this fall at an event hosted by John Waters in New York City.

Shani Boianjiu of Jerusalem, the youngest of the honorees at twenty-four, was selected for 5 Under 35 by Nicole Krauss. A veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, Boianjiu is working on a novel titled, "The People of Forever Are Not Afraid."

Danielle Evans, author of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize–winning story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead Books, 2010), was nominated by Robert Stone. Evans, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, lives in Washington, D.C.

Julia Glass selected New York State native Mary Beth Keene, author of The Walking People (Mariner Books, 2009). Keene, a mother of two boys, is working on her second novel.

Alaska-born Melinda Moustakis, whose first book, Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories (Unviersity of Georgia Press, 2011), won the Flannery O'Connor Award in Short Fiction, was selected by Jaimy Gordon.

Oscar Hijuelos chose Louisiana author John Corey Whaley, the first 5 Under 35 author to be recognized for young adult fiction. Whaley's debut is the novel Where Things Come Back (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2011).

The 5 Under 35 celebration, held on November 14, will kick off National Book Awards week. The awards in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and young people's literature will be announced at the foundation's annual dinner on November 16.