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:
“Is anyone ever really who they want to be? I haven’t yet met anyone who is—even when they think they are. It’s human nature to long for things—to long to be different from what you are, to long for something other than what you have—and that’s the engine that drives all good fiction.” Celeste Ng talks with the Los Angeles Review of Books about fiction and her most recent novel, Little Fires Everywhere.
The shortlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction was released yesterday, and includes writers Elif Batuman, Kamila Shamsie, and Jesmyn Ward. The winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced on June 6.
The Broadway play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child opened this weekend to rave reviews. The play runs for five and a half hours and is the most expensive play in Broadway history. (NPR)
Two researchers at Queens College have found that of the more than two million books published in North America between 2002 and 2012, the price of books by women authors was 45 percent less than the price of books by men. (Fast Company)
Essence released a list of “Woke 100 Women” to highlight black women who “are proven change agents, shape-shifters, and power players across the nation and beyond.” Among the hundred are writers Elizabeth Alexander and Doreen St. Félix, Well-Read Black Girl founder Glory Edim, poets Eve L. Ewing and Amanda Gorman, National Book Foundation executive director Lisa Lucas, and Feminist Press editor Jamia Wilson.
Read pieces about Ewing, Gorman, Lucas, and Wilson in previous issues of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Writer Curtis Sittenfeld writes a history of the shirt she wore to almost every literary event for several years as a “reaction against the pressure created by social media to curate an alluring self-image.” (New Yorker)
British publisher Virago will publish two recently discovered story collections by Noel Streatfeild, the author of the classic children’s “Shoe” book series. (Guardian)
Michele Filgate profiles writer Sheila Heti, whose new novel, Motherhood, addresses how being a mother “relates to your own experience of being a child and your own experience of what you want to do in the world and what relationship you are in.” (Publishers Weekly)
