Jump to navigation Skip to content
Writer and artist Kristen Radtke’s debut graphic memoir, Imagine Wanting Only This, combines vivid illustrations with an unflinching investigation of loss, memory, and the construction and dissolution of the self.
Parul Sehgal discusses her path to literary criticism, her passion for international literature, and today’s finest reviewers.
The winners of the 101st annual Pulitzer Prizes were announced today at Columbia University in New York City. Of the twenty-one categories, the prizes in letters are awarded annually for works of literature published in the previous year. Each winner receives $10,000.
Tyehimba Jess won the prize in poetry for his collection Olio (Wave Books). The finalists were the late Adrienne Rich for Collected Poems: 1950-2012 (W.W. Norton) and Campbell McGrath for XX (Ecco).
Colson Whitehead won the prize in fiction for his novel The Underground Railroad (Doubleday). The finalists were Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown) and C. E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Hisham Matar won the prize in autobiography for The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (Random House). The finalists were Susan Faludi’s In the Darkroom (Metropolitan Books) and the late Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air (Random House).
Visit the Pulitzer Prize website for a complete list of winners and finalists in each of the twenty-one categories, including general nonfiction, journalism, and drama.
Hungarian-American newspaper publisher and journalist Joseph Pulitzer established the Pulitzer Prizes in 1911, and the first prize was administered in 1917. The 2016 winners included poet Peter Balakian and fiction writer Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Listen to Tyehimba Jess read an excerpt from Olio, and hear an interview with Colson Whitehead about The Underground Railroad in Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast.
(Photo, from left: Tyehimba Jess, Colson Whitehead)
“I report, that is my profession. I report, as a loud noise testifies to a gun.” Upon the posthumous publication of Doctorow: Collected Stories (Random House, 2017), Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jennifer Egan read from E. L. Doctorow’s short stories in celebration of his life and work at the 92nd Street Y.
Thirteen Reasons Why (Razorbill, 2007), Jay Asher’s best-selling young adult novel about a teenager piecing together the story and circumstances behind the suicide of a classmate, has been adapted into a television series.
Rebecca Solnit and the impact of feminist storytelling; Edgar Allen Poe’s foray into natural philosophy; the challenges of writing a Trump biography for children; and other news.
Colum McCann’s writing advice; Patricia Lockwood on her new memoir, Priestdaddy; the changing definition of historical fiction; and other news.
In classic Greek tragedies, the term hamartia, first described in Aristotle’s Poetics, refers to a fatal flaw in the main character of the drama, which causes a chain of events to unfold: a reversal of fortune from good to bad, and the eventual downfall of the character. One traditional example of such a flaw is hubris, an overblown ego and lack of humility. Write a short story in which your protagonist suffers from an unfortunate degree of hubris. Does overconfident pride blind the character to the consequences of that individual’s actions? Does arrogance lead the protagonist toward one big mistake, or several small errors that lead inevitably to tragic misfortune?
Imbolo Mbue has won the 2017 PEN/Faulkner Award for her debut novel, Behold the Dreamers (Random House, 2016). She will receive $15,000, and will be honored at a ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. on May 6. The annual award is given for a book of fiction published during the previous year.
“Behold The Dreamers displays a remarkable confidence impressive for a debut novel,” says Chris Abani, who judged the prize along with Chantel Acevedo and Sigrid Nunez. “Imbolo Mbue has a fine ear for dialogue and the nuance of language. Without ever leaning into sentimentality and yet managing to steer clear of cruelty, she pushes her characters through true difficulties into a believable and redemptive transformation. Behold The Dreamers reveals a writer with a capacious imagination, and the warmth and compassion to craft a career of beautiful and important novels.”
Imbolo Mbue is a native of Limbe, Cameroon, and currently lives in New York City. Mbue was one of the five featured authors in Poets & Writers Magazine’s 2016 roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction; read an excerpt of Behold the Dreamers in “First Fiction 2016” and listen to Mbue read the excerpt in episode eight of Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast.
The finalists for the prize, who each receive $5,000, were Viet Dinh for After Disasters (Little A), Louise Erdrich for LaRose (HarperCollins), Garth Greenwell for What Belongs to You (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Sunil Yapa for Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (Little, Brown). The finalists were selected from almost five hundred novels and story collections submitted by 143 publishers.
Established in 1981, the PEN/Faulkner Award has also been given to James Hannaham, Karen Joy Fowler, E. L. Doctorow, Ann Patchett, John Updike, and Sherman Alexie, among others.
![13 Reasons Why | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix](https://www.pw.org/files/styles/video_thumb_medium/public/media-oembed/i.ytimg.com/vi/JebwYGn5Z3E/hqdefault.jpg?itok=-jZdajeJ)
