Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories:
Zambian British poet Kayo Chingonyi has won the 2018 International Dylan Thomas Prize for his debut poetry collection, Kumukanda. The £30,000 prize is given for the best book of poetry, fiction, or drama published in the previous year by an author who is 39 or younger.
Speaking of Thomas, today is Dylan Thomas Day, which commemorates the day when his play Under Milk Wood was read at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Events celebrating the famed Welsh poet will be held in Wales, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Poet Mathias Svalina has started a “Dream Delivery Service,” through which he bikes around a city at night delivering dreams typed on pink slips of paper to subscribers. Svalina writes the dreams himself and runs the service in a different city each month. (Hyperallergic)
Peter Mayer, the former CEO of the Penguin Group, has died at age eighty-two. Mayer, who had a “penchant for rule-bending,” published Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel The Satanic Verses in 1988. (New York Times)
The Guardian interviews Michael Chabon about his new essay collection, Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces, encouraging his kids’ “freakozoid” tendencies, and balancing art and parenthood.
In book deal news: Little, Brown has acquired Ronan Farrow’s new investigative book, Catch and Kill, which continues Farrow’s work on sexual harassment. Meanwhile, Morgan Parker has sold an untitled young adult debut novel to Delacorte. The novel, about a “black teen triumphantly figuring out her identity when her conservative town deems depression as a lack of faith and blackness as something to be politely ignored,” will come out in Fall 2019. (Publishers Weekly)
“Fear was ever-present as I worked on my book. I found it was best to acknowledge it, but not let its presence stun me into paralysis.” Morgan Jerkins describes writing about personal issues while fearing what her parents would think. (Longreads)
NPR’s All Things Considered talks with writer Jez Burrow, who wrote a book of stories based on example sentences found in the dictionary.
