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“Do what you want to do, and don’t worry if it's a little odd or doesn’t fit the market.” Lydia Davis, whose latest collection of stories, Can't and Won't, was released in paperback by Picador in March, offers practical and reassuring advice for writers.
An updated version of director Mary McDonagh Murphy's documentary Harper Lee: Hey, Boo airs tonight on PBS. Harper Lee's second novel, Go Set a Watchman, will be released by HarperCollins on July 14, fifty-five years after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird (Lippincott, 1960).
"Just like a good book, parenting is unpredictable." Julia Fierro's debut novel was released in paperback yesterday by St. Martin's Griffin with a helpful extra page for parenting emergencies.
Keep your ears open this week, and write down an intriguing phrase that you overhear. This might be a snippet of a sentence exchanged between two people talking, a few words spoken by someone on the phone next to you, or even part of a loudspeaker announcement. Spend some time imagining what led up to that remark. Then write the rest of the story making the overheard phrase your last sentence.
This morning, the Man Booker Foundation announced that beginning in 2016, the Man Booker International Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize will merge to form one annual award for an individual work of fiction translated into English. The reconfigured Man Booker International Prize will divide an award of £50,000 equally between author and translator. Each of the six shortlisted authors and translators will also receive £1,000.
Established in 2005, the Man Booker International Prize has until now awarded one prize of £60,000 biennially to “a living author for a body of work representing an achievement in fiction on the world stage.” Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai won the prize in 2015. The annual Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (IFFP), meanwhile, honored a single work of fiction translated into English. A prize of £10,000 was split equally between author and translator. The 2015 winner was Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days (Portobello Books), translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky.
Jonathan Taylor, chair of the Booker Prize Foundation, said in a press conference that the Man Booker International Prize loses momentum by being awarded every two years instead of annually, and hopes the “reconfiguration of the prize will encourage a greater interest and investment in translation."
Independent senior writer Boyd Tonkin will serve as the 2016 Man Booker International Prize chair. The longlist for the new Man Booker International Prize will be announced in March 2016, followed by the shortlist announcement in April; the winner will be announced in May. Books translated into English and published between January 1, 2015, and April 30, 2016, are eligible for the award.
Erika Swyler's debut novel, published by St. Martin's Press, features mermaids, drownings, tarot cards, and a librarian who uncovers mysteries about his family.
Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, speaks with Beacon Press president Helene Atwan about his debut novel, Muse (Knopf, 2015), which is featured in Page One in the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
This week, jot down a list of five actions you perform on a daily basis—maybe it's tying your shoes, getting off at a certain bus stop, buying a cup of coffee, or brushing your teeth. Choose one of these mundane moments and write a scene in which a character is in the middle of performing this everyday task. Then bring in an element of the fantastic: Does an extraterrestrial or a doppelgänger appear? Is the character suddenly transported into the past or future? Explore the possibilities of what can occur when the ordinary collides with the extraordinary.
Her books, for readers of all ages, have been published in thirty-two languages and sold more than eighty-five million copies worldwide, but Judy Blume, whose new novel, In the Unlikely Event, was published by Knopf in June, has always taken a simple approach to her work: “I do what I have to do to tell the story.”
Naomi Jackson shares her favorite writing tools and personal photos that provided inspiration for the characters in her debut novel, The Star Side of Bird Hill, published today by Penguin Press. Read more about Jackson in “First Fiction 2015" in the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, and catch her tour in the Reading Tour Manager.
