G&A: The Contest Blog

Last night at a ceremony in New York City, James McBride received the National Book Award for his novel The Good Lord Bird, published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, this past August.

Victoria Will/Associated Press

A surprised McBride took the stage and said that he had not prepared a speech, as he hadn’t planned on winning. Considered the underdog of the shortlist, he beat out finalists Rachel Kushner, for her novel The Flamethrowers; Jhumpa Lahiri, for her novel The Lowland; Thomas Pynchon, for his novel Bleeding Edge; and George Saunders, for his short story collection Tenth of December. Charles Baxter, Gish Jen, Charles McGrath, Rick Simonson, and René Steinke judged.

McBride, the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir The Color of Water and the novels Miracle at St. Anna and Song Yet Sung, said he wrote his latest novel, about the journey of a young slave in the 1850s, amidst the death of his mother and the dissolution of his marriage.

The poetry award went to Mary Szybist for her collection Incarnadine, published by Graywolf Press. George Packer won in nonfiction for The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The award in young people’s literature went to Cynthia Kadohata for The Thing About Luck.

Maya Angelou received the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, a prize that was presented by Toni Morrison. E. L. Doctorow received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. 

The winners of the National Book Award each received $10,000. The awards are given annually by the National Book Foundation for works of literature published in the previous year.

The National Book Foundation will kick off National Book Awards Week tonight in Brooklyn, New York, with its annual 5 Under 35 celebration, during which five emerging fiction writers under the age of thirty-five will be honored for their work.

The 2013 5 Under 35 honorees are: Molly Antopol, The UnAmericans (Norton, 2014), selected by Jesmyn Ward; NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names (Reagan Arthur Books, 2013), selected by Junot Díaz; Amanda Coplin,The Orchardist (Harper, 2012), selected by Louise Erdrich, the 2012 National Book Award winner in fiction; Daisy Hildyard, Hunters in the Snow, (Jonathan Cape, 2013), selected by Kevin Powers; and Merritt Tierce, Love Me Back (Doubleday, 2014), selected by Ben Fountain.

Carrie Brownstein, a musician and the co-creator, writer, and star of Portlandia, will host the event. Author Colson Whitehead will DJ, and Fiona Maazel, a 2008 5 Under 35 honoree and author most recently of the novel Woke Up Lonely (Graywolf Press) will moderate a conversation with the writers.

Established in 2006, the 5 Under 35 five program honors five young fiction writers each year, who are selected by past National Book Award winners and finalists. The program has recognized emerging writers such as Téa Obreht, Karen Russell, and Justin Torres. Each of the winning authors receives a cash prize of $1,000. For the first time in the program’s history, the selected authors are all women.

The annual National Book Awards ceremony—during which the winners of the 2013 National Book Awards in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and young people’s literature will be announced­—takes place this Wednesday night in New York City. For live coverage of tonight’s 5 Under 35 celebration follow Prize Reporter on Twitter, and stay tuned to the G&A Blog for continued coverage of National Book Awards Week.

Fiction writer Claire Vaye Watkins has been named the winner of the 2013 Dylan Thomas Prize. She receives the £30,000 (approximately $48,000) award for Battleborn, her debut short story collection.

The international prize is awarded annually for a book of poetry, fiction, or nonfiction or a play in English by a writer under the age of thirty.

Watkins, twenty-nine, is the second American author in a row to receive the prize, following novelist Maggie Shipstead’s win in 2012. Watkins received the award during a ceremony in Swansea, Wales, late last week. In addition to the prize money, Watkins was presented with a bronze cast of a young Dylan Thomas. The shortlist included two poets and five prose writers from around the world.

Battleborn, published by Riverhead Books in the United States and by Granta Books in the UK, addresses the myth of the American West. Watkins, who was born in California and raised in Nevada near the Death Valley, has won a number of awards for the book, including the annual Story Prize.

Chair of judges Peter Florence said, “Claire Vaye Watkins has some of Dylan Thomas’s extraordinary skill in the short story form of giving you a perfect vision of a complete world and that’s extraordinarily rare.”

The prize is yet another nod to the form of the short story, following Alice Munro’s win of the Nobel Prize last month.

Founded in 2006, the Dylan Thomas Prize celebrates the legacy of Welsh poet and writer Dylan Thomas, who is known for writing some of his best work in his twenties.

The New York City–based Academy of American Poets has extended the deadline for its annual Walt Whitman Award until December 1. The award includes a cash prize of $5,000 and publication for a first book of poetry.

The winning work will be published by Louisiana State University Press, and will be distributed to thousands of Academy members. In addition, the winner will receive a one-month residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and will be invited to read at the annual Poets Forum in New York City next fall. Previous winners have also been profiled in American Poet, the Academy's biannual magazine, which is sent to all of the organization’s 8,500 members.

Original manuscripts in English written by current United States citizens who have not yet published a full-length collection are eligible. Individual poems may have been previously published in periodicals or limited-edition chapbooks. Visit the Academy of American Poets website for complete guidelines.

Using the online submission manager, poets may submit a collection between 50 and 100 pages with a $30 entry fee by December 1. Rae Armantrout will judge.

In addition to its writing awards, the Academy of American Poets, founded in 1934, administers a variety of programs, including National Poetry Month, celebrated nationwide in April each year; numerous events and readings; free online educational resources; and an extensive audio archive of over 700 recordings dating back to the 1960s.

Chris Hosea of Brooklyn, New York, won the 2013 prize for his collection Put Your Hands In. Minnesota poet Matt Rasmussen, who won the 2012 award for his collection Black Aperture, has since been shortlisted for the National Book Award in poetry. Listen to Rasmussen read the poem "After Suicide" from his winning collection.

Poet and fiction writer Mia Couto of Mozambique has won the 2014 Neustadt Prize for Literature. The $50,000 prize is given internationally for lifetime achievement.

Couto, 58, is the first Mozambican author to be nominated for and to win the prize. His books include the novels Sleepwalking Land and The Last Flight of the Flamingo and a short story collection, Voices Made Night. His works have been published in more than twenty languages.

Italo-Ethiopian author Gabriella Ghermandi, who nominated Couto for the prize, said, “He is an author who addresses not just his country but the entire world, all human beings.”

Sponsored by the University of Oklahoma; World Literature Today, the university’s magazine of international literature and culture; and the Neustadt family, the international prize is awarded to a poet, fiction writer, or playwright. Couto was chosen by a jury of nine international authors.

Established in 1969, the award is given every two years. Previous winners include Elizabeth Bishop, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alice Munro, Octavio Paz, Orhan Pamuk, and Mo Yan.

Couto is the twenty-third laureate of the Neustadt Prize and will accept the award at the University of Oklahoma during the Fall 2014 Neustadt Festival.

The Whiting Writers’ Awards, given annually by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation to ten emerging writers who show “exceptional talent and promise in early career,” were announced on Monday. Each writer will receive the $50,000. 

The 2013 winners are Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, a fiction and nonfiction writer whose novella, The Man Who Danced with Dolls, was published in 2012 by Madras Press; Amanda Coplin, a fiction writer whose first novel, The Orchardist, was published by HarperCollins in 2012; Jennifer duBois, a fiction writer whose debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, was published by Dial Press in 2012, and whose newest novel, Cartwheel, was published in September by Random House; Virginia Grise, the author of several plays including Making Myth; Ishion Hutchinson, a poet whose debut collection, Far District, was published by Peepal Tree Press Limited in 2010; Morgan Meis, a nonfiction writer whose collection of essays, Ruins, was published by Fallen Bros Press in 2012; C. E. Morgan, a fiction writer whose first novel, All the Living, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2009; Rowan Ricardo Phillips, a poet whose first collection, The Ground, was published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in 2012; Clifford Thompson, a fiction and nonfiction writer whose essay collection, Love for Sale, was published this year by Autumn House Press; and Stephanie Powell Watts, a fiction writer whose debut story collection, We Are Taking Only What We Need, was published in 2012 by BkMk Press. 

The Whiting Awards honor works in the categories of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays, and are intended to identify writers “who have yet to make their mark on the literary culture.'’

Since 1985, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Writing Foundation has given over $6 million to 290 writers. Visit the website to learn more about this year's winners.

Eleanor Catton was awarded the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday for The Luminaries, an epic novel set in nineteenth-century New Zealand. Catton, twenty-eight, is the youngest person to ever receive the prize.

Born in Canada and raised in Christchurch, New Zealand, Catton began writing the book, her second novel, at age twenty-five. The previous youngest recipient of the award, Ben Okri, won the prize in 1991 at age thirty-two. At 848 pages, The Luminaries (published by Granta in Britain and Little, Brown in the U.S.) is also the longest novel to win the award. Catton is only the second person from New Zealand to win.

The prize was announced at a ceremony in London’s Guildhall. Chair of judges Robert Macfarlane called the book a “dazzling work, luminous, vast” with an “extraordinarily gripping” narrative. “The Luminaries is a novel you pan, as if for gold, and the returns are huge,” Macfarlane said. “Maturity is evident in every sentence, in the rhythms and balances. It is a novel of astonishing control.”
 
Catton beat out five other finalists for the prize: We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo; Harvest by Jim Crace; A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki; The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri; and The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin. According British betting site Ladbrokes, Crace was the favorite to win. Catton will receive £50,000, or about $80,000.

It’s been a few good years for historical fiction, Hilary Mantel having won the prize both in 2009 and 2012 for Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, respectively, the first two books in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy.

Britain’s most prestigious literary prize, the Booker has been awarded annually for forty-five years to a novelist from the United Kingdom, Ireland, or the British Commonwealth. Last month, however, the Booker Prize Foundation announced that, beginning in 2014, the prize would be open to all novels written in English and published in the United Kingdom, regardless of the author’s nationality.

In total, 151 books were nominated for this year’s prize. The winner is selected by the judging panel on the day of the ceremony.