Genre: Fiction

Black Balloon Publishing, an imprint of the newly established Catapult, has announced Tegan Nia Swanson as the winner of the 2014 Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize for her debut novel, Things We Found When the Water Went Down. The annual award includes a prize of $5,000 and publication for a novel or short story collection.

The editors selected Swanson’s book from more than 1,500 submissions. “Tegan’s novel is organized as a series of artifacts,” says Black Balloon associate editor Julie Buntin. “Reading Things We Found When the Water Went Down is a process of discovery, of excavation, and it’s precisely this narrative ambition that makes the book such a perfect fit for this prize. I had the sense while turning the pages that I was in the presence of something new.”

Swanson is a graduate of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University, where she was the 2011 Pearl Hogrefe Fellow. Her fiction has appeared in Ecotone, Bellingham Review, and Connu, and in the Black Earth Institute’s About Place Journal. She won the 2013 Tobias Wolff Award in Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2014 Fiction Fellowships at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She currently lives in Lyon, France.

Things We Found When the Water Went Down will be published by Black Balloon in the fall of 2016, and will be distributed by Publishers Group West. The finalists for this year’s prize were Anne Corbitt, Joan Frank, and Karen Tucker.

Founded in 2013, the prize is named for Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, a one-eyed, one-armed British naval commander made famous for his victories against the French during the Napoleonic Wars—a man “who defied convention at every turn.” 

Mike Meginnins won the inaugural Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize for his debut novel, Fat Man and Little Boy, which was published in October 2014.

The winners of the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced last night at the New School in New York City. Claudia Rankine, whose poetry collection Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press) was the first book in the NBCC’s history to be nominated in two categories—poetry and criticism—took home the award in poetry. Marilynne Robinson won in fiction for her novel Lila (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), and Roz Chast won the autobiography prize for her graphic memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury).John Lahr won in biography for Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (Norton); David Brion Davis won in general nonfiction for The Problem of Slavery In the Age of Emancipation (Knopf); and the criticism prize was awarded posthumously to Ellen Willis for The Essential Ellen Willis (University of Minnesota Press), edited by Willis’s daughter, Nona Willis Aronowitz. Phil Klay won the John Leonard Prize for his National Book Award–winning short story collection, Redeployment (Penguin Press); the John Leonard Prize recognizes an outstanding first book in any genre. Alexandra Schwartz, an assistant editor at the New Yorker, won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

The poetry finalists were Saeed Jones’s Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Press), Willie Perdomo’s The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon (Penguin Books), Christian Wiman’s Once in the West (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and the late Jake Adam York’s Abide (Southern Illinois University Press).

The finalists in fiction were Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman (Grove Press), Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead), Lily King’s Euphoria (Atlantic Monthly Press), and Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (Riverhead).

The autobiography finalists were Blake Bailey’s The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (Norton), Lacy M. Johnson’s The Other Side (Tin House), Gary Shteyngart’s Little Failure (Random House), and Meline Toumani’s There Was and There Was Not (Metropolitan Books).

Established in 1974, the National Book Critics Circle Awards, which are considered amongst the most prestigious awards given in the literary world, are given annually for books published in the previous year. A board of twenty-four working newspaper and magazine critics and editors nominates and selects the winners each year. The 2013 winners included Frank Bidart for poetry and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for fiction.

Photos from left to right: Claudia Rankine (Ricardo DeAratanha/Los Angeles Times), Marilynne Robinson (Ulf Andersen/Getty), and Roz Chast (Bill Franzen/Washington Post)

The finalists for the 2015 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction have been announced. The annual award honors the best work of fiction published by an American author in the previous year.

The five finalists are Jeffery Renard Allen’s Song of the Shank (Graywolf Press), Jennifer Clement’s Prayers for the Stolen (Hogarth), Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life (Tyrant Books), Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (Knopf), and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (Knopf). More information about the finalists can be found on the PEN/Faulkner website.