Jump to navigation Skip to content
Write a story that is a retelling of a classic myth set in contemporary times. How do the characters change? What is the effect of a contemporary setting? Does the story end the same way? For inspiration, read Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red.
The book critic at the Washington Post has a little fun with Publishers Weekly's recent announcement that E L James, the author of the Fifty Shades trilogy of adult romance novels, is the Publishing Person of the Year.
Novelist, memoirist, and essayist Siri Hustvedt, whose most recent book is the essay collection Living, Thinking, Looking (Picador, 2012), talks here about "between space...the zone of action between people through which a third entity is created. Something like a third presence in the room."
American author Kevin Powers's debut novel, The Yellow Birds (Little, Brown, 2012), a fictional account of one man's experiences during the Iraq war, has received the 2012 Guardian First Book Award. Powers will receive ten thousand British pounds.
Inspired by Powers’s own experiences as a machine gunner in Iraq, The Yellow Birds takes its name from a marching song that Powers learned while serving in the army. Lisa Allardice, judging panel chair and editor of the Guardian Review, reported that Powers “utterly fulfilled the first book award criteria of promise, originality and raw talent.” Allardice was joined on a panel of judges by authors Ahdaf Soueif, Kate Summerscale, William Dalrymple, and Jeanette Winterson, and Guardian deputy editor Katharine Viner.
Powers was chosen from a shortlist that included two other debut novels, Scottish author Kerry Hudson's Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-cream Float Before He Stole My Ma (Chatto & Windus, 2012) and American novelist Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding (Little, Brown, 2011), as well as two works of nonfiction—Lindsey Hilsum's account of the Libyan revolution, Sandstorm (Penguin Press, 2012) and Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House, 2012), which won the National Book Award in nonfiction in November.
Established in 1999 by the editors of the U.K.-based Guardian, the annual First Book Award is given for a debut work of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction published in the previous year. Powers joins an international cast of winners that includes Siddhartha Mukherjee, who received the award last year for The Emperor of All Maladies (Fourth Estate, 2011), as well as Philip Gourevitch, Yiyun Li, Jonathan Safran Foer, Zadie Smith, and Chris Ware.
For more information about the Guardian First Book Award, visit the website. To listen to a discussion from the judges about this year's shortlist and an interview with Kevin Powers about his winning novel, check out this podcast from the Guardian.
"I'm an acquired taste, I think," says the author of nine novels, including The Yips (Open Road, 2012). Barker has been compared to a maggot working into the corpse of fiction, a description that doesn't seem to bother her: "When something irritates you, often it's the most powerful thing," she says.
Write down snippets of conversation that you overhear throughout the day. Choose a few compelling lines and write a story based on this dialogue, letting it direct the story line and the characters you imagine.
Write a scene for a story that takes place at the Thanksgiving day table during dinner or in the kitchen during preparations for the meal with two characters who are are angry at each other but not addressing their conflict directly.
The cartoonist and author of the graphic novel Building Stories speaks with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW's Bookworm.
Poet, fiction writer, and editor of the literary magazine Cactus Heart, Sara Rauch talks about drawing inspiration from simple things and capturing the beauty of everyday life in writing.
![Chris Ware on Bookworm [2012]](https://www.pw.org/files/styles/video_thumb_medium/public/media-oembed/i.ytimg.com/vi/cxsMhhHRtJE/hqdefault.jpg?itok=7Wn_UwfU)
