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Take some time this week to discover the work of a well-known photographer. Whether you visit an exhibition at a museum or peruse the internet, look for photographs that capture your imagination. Examine a photograph closely and write the story you see in the frame. Rely heavily on descriptive language and offer details of the composition through your writing. What did the photographer keep in focus?
Hungarian fiction writer László Krasznahorkai has won the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. Krasznahorkai was presented with the £60,000 award (approximately $90,000) Tuesday evening at a ceremony in London. Kasznahorkai’s two English translators, George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet, will split the £15,000 translator’s prize.
The Man Booker International Prize is given biennially to honor a fiction writer who writes in English or whose work has been translated into English. This year’s judges were Nadeem Aslam, Elleke Boehmer, Edwin Frank, Wen-chin Ouyang, and Marina Warner. The finalists for the prize were César Aira, Hoda Barakat, Maryse Condé, Mia Couto, Amitav Ghosh, Fanny Howe, Ibrahim al-Koni, Alain Mabanckou, and Marlene van Niekerk.
“Laszlo Krasznahorkai is a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of present day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic, and often shatteringly beautiful,” said chair of judges Warner. “The Melancholy of Resistance, Sátántangó and Seiobo There Below are magnificent works of deep imagination and complex passions, in which the human comedy verges painfully onto transcendence.”
Born in Gyula, Hungary in 1954, Krasznahorkai has written almost a dozen novels and short story collections, and his works have been translated into German, Polish, French, Spanish, and other languages. New Directions has published English translations of five of his novels. Krasznahorkai is perhaps best known for his 1993 postmodern novel The Melancholy of Resistance, which won numerous literary prizes, including the German Bestenliste Prize and the Kossuth Prize, which is the highest award given in Hungary.
Sponsored by the London-based Man Group, the Man Booker International Prize was established in 2005 and “highlights one writer’s continued creativity, development, and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage.” The Man Group also administers the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Recent winners of the Man Booker International Prize include Lydia Davis (2013), Philip Roth (2011), and Alice Munro (2009).
This week, write a story in which one of your characters gets lost in an unfamiliar location with no one around to help him. How did he end up in this situation? Perhaps his car breaks down in the middle of the desert, or he's adrift in the Pacific Ocean after a shipwreck and is the lone survivor. Is he able to find his bearings? Does he manage to get to safety? Consider the perils of being stranded in an unforgiving and potentially dangerous environment.
Ruth Rendell speaks about how to get into the mind of a character in a talk at the Center for Fiction in New York City. Rendell, best known for her Chief Inspector Wexford series, passed away on May 2 at the age of eighty-five.
The New York City–based Center for Fiction has announced its 2015 Emerging Writer Fellows. The annual fellowships are given to emerging fiction writers of any age living in New York City “whose work shows promise of excellence.”
This year’s nine fellows are Naomi Feigelson Chase, Lisa Chen, Nicola DeRobertis-Theye, t’ai freedom ford, Anu Jindal, Stephen Langlois, Melissa Rivero, Samantha Storey, and Ruchika Tomar. The fellows were chosen from over five hundred applicants. Rene Denfeld, Patricia Park, and Ted Thompson judged. Visit the Center for Fiction website for bios of each of this year’s fellows.
As part of the fellowship, each writer receives a grant of $4,000; the option of mentorship with an editor; the opportunity to meet with agents who represent new writers; a Center for Fiction membership; free admission to all Center events for one year, including its Craftwork lecture series on writing; and a 30 percent discount on tuition for select writing workshops at the Center. The fellows will also each give two public readings as part of the Center’s annual program of events.
Emerging writers living in one of the five boroughs of New York City are eligible for the fellowship. The Center for Fiction defines “emerging writer” as one of any age who has not yet published a novel or short story collection with a major or independent publisher, and who is also not currently under contract to a publisher for a work of fiction. Eligible applicants may have had works of fiction published in magazines, literary journals, or online, though previous publication is not required. Writers in degree-granting programs are ineligible.
Applications for the 2016 Emerging Writers Fellowship will open in the fall. Visit the Center for Fiction website for more information about the fellowship program.
"What is a girl but this? This obscene and beautiful making, this brilliant imagination inventing meaning." Lidia Yuknavitch's novel The Small Backs of Children is forthcoming from Harper in July.
This morning, PEN American Center announced the winners of the 2015 PEN Literary Awards. The annual awards, which total more than $150,000, honor emerging and established writers in seventeen categories including poetry, debut fiction, science writing, translation, biography, and drama. On June 8, the winners will be honored in a ceremony at the New School in New York City. The shortlists and complete list of winners can be found on PEN’s website. Below are the winners for a select few prizes:
Saeed Jones won the $5,000 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry for his collection Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House). Marie Howe, Mary Szybist, and Craig Morgan Teicher judged. The biennial award recognizes the work of an emerging American poet who shows promise of further literary achievement.
Joshua Horwitz won the $10,000 PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award for his book War of the Whales: A True Story (Simon & Schuster). Sue Halpern, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, and Carl Zimmer judged. The annual prize is given for a book of literary nonfiction on the subject of the physical or biological sciences published in the previous year.
Sheri Fink won the $10,000 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction for her book Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (Crown). Andrew Blechman, Paul Elie, Azadeh Moaveni, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, and Paul Reyes judged. The biennial award is given to an author of a book of general nonfiction published in the previous two years that possesses notable literary merit and critical perspective.
Denise Newman won the $3,000 PEN Translation Prize for her translation from the Danish of Naja Heather Cleary’s book Baboon (Two Lines). Lucas Klein, Tess Lewis, and Allison Markin Powell judged. The annual award is given for a translation of book-length prose from any language into English published in the previous year.
PEN will announce the winners of the $25,000 Prize for Debut Fiction, the $10,000 Art of the Essay Award, and the $5,000 Open Book Award at the Literary Awards Ceremony on June 8. Visit the PEN website for the shortlists. The winner of the $10,000 PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize and recipients of the $2,000-$4,000 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants will be announced later this month.
PEN American Center has administered its literary awards for nearly fifty years. Established in 1922, PEN works globally to defend freedom of expression and to promote international literature and culture.
Did one of your characters have a major turning point in her past? Is this event or decision crucial for this character's development? This week, take a scene you're stuck on and rewrite it as if that turning point had never occurred, and an alternate option was chosen. If your character moved to London because she was transferred by her company instead of moving back to her parents' house in Florida, how would this outcome deepen the evolution of this character? Think about what this character needs to face—what shortcomings, fears, and hindrances she needs to overcome—and force her to come to terms with these obstacles.
"It's not the duty, but it's certainly the pleasure of a novelist to recreate their imagination and the stories that are lost." Kate Atkinson speaks about her latest novel, A God in Ruins (Little, Brown, 2015), which tells the story of a Royal Air Force pilot in World War II and his postwar family life.
In this debut novel by Helen Phillips, a young wife's new job, which consists of entering numbers into something only known as the Database, is linked to a larger mystery.The Beautiful Bureaucrat is forthcoming from Henry Holt in August.
