Genre: Fiction

Whiting Awards Help Early-Career Writers "Negotiate With Their Doubts"

G&A: The Contest Blog
10.26.11

Last night in New York City the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation offered another group of emerging writers what could be a life- and career-altering gift. Since 1985, the foundation has annually offered fifty-thousand-dollar prizes to ten writers whose early work suggests the promise of a flourishing career—Jeffrey Eugenides, Yiyun Li, Jonathan Franzen, Mary Karr, and Terrance Hayes are among the 270 poets, authors, and playwrights to have received the award in the past.

The 2011 Whiting Writers' Award honorees, most of whom have published only one book, are poets Don Mee Choi, Eduardo C. Corral, Shane McCrae, and Kerri Webster; fiction writers Scott Blackwood, Ryan Call, Daniel Orozco, and Teddy Wayne; memoirist Paul Clemens; and playwright Amy Herzog. None of these writers applied for the award; winners are nominated by a group of anonymous literary professionals, which have historically included editors, agents, bookstore owners, and critics.

Poet Mark Doty, who received the Writers' Award in 1994, delivered the prize address, encouraging the winners to "savor this brilliant occasion of attention and celebration" and store it for those inevitable occasions where rejection and self-doubt threaten to define the day.

"May these awards...help you to negotiate with your doubts," he said. "May this award lend you aid and comfort while you move ahead in what I hope will be a long, happy work in service of what is real."

In the video below, Don Mee Choi reads from her book, The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010).

October 27

The Time Is Now
10.26.11

My guiding philosophy of writing, maybe even of life, is that the path to the truth runs through shame. So dig through your memory banks and write about the most shameful episode you can remember. The challenge here is to provide the reader the basic dramatic context, then to slow down and move moment-to-moment during the worst of it. This need not be for general consumption. It's more an exercise in radical disclosure.
Today's fiction prompt comes from fiction writer Steve Almond, whose most recent book God Bless America: Stories was published this week by Lookout Books.

Michael Cunningham on Print vs. E-books

Caption: 

The author of several novels, including The Hours, Flesh and Blood, and By Nightfall, has had it with readers who "stand in front of the bullet train of history" and insist that books must be made out of paper—as this video from inReads makes abundantly clear. "The world changes; things move on," the Pulitzer Prize-winning author says.

Genre: 
Fiction
Tags: 
interview
Pulitzer Prize
e-books
Michael Cunningham

Julie Otsuka on Her National Book Award Nomination

Caption: 

The author of The Buddha in the Attic, who was profiled by Renée H. Shea in the September/October 2011 issue, talks about her novel's nomination for this year's National Book Award in fiction. "I feel lucky to even have an audience," she says. "A prize is something I never really thought about. Usually my concerns are very local, like 'Can I make it through this sentence or through this paragraph?'"

Genre: 
Fiction
Tags: 
National Book Award
Knopf
2011
The Buddha in the Attic
Julie Otsuka
September/October 2011

Chip Kidd's Cover Design for Murakami's 1Q84

Caption: 

Chip Kidd, the associate art director at Knopf and Pantheon, talks about his cover design for Haruki Murakami's novel 1Q84. Note the Spirograph drawings behind his desk (three of them were featured in Kidd's design of the January/February 2010 cover of Poets & Writers Magazine). And read Ken Gordon's take on the girth of Murakami's huge book and others in the current issue.

Genre: 
Poetry
Fiction
Creative Nonfiction
Tags: 
Knopf
Pantheon
Haruki Murakami
Chip Kidd
January/February 2010
1Q84

October 20

The Time Is Now
10.20.11

Pick a short story by another writer and use its ending as the beginning for a new story of your own.

Fourth Time's a Charm for Julian Barnes

G&A: The Contest Blog
10.19.11

The Man Booker Prize was awarded last night to British author Julian Barnes, who had been a contender for the honor on three previous occasions. The author, who once called the prize "posh bingo," won this year for his best-selling novel The Sense of an Ending, published earlier this month in the United States by Knopf (the original U.K. publisher is Jonathan Cape).

Barnes, who was a finalist in 1984, 1998, and 2005, says he stands by his earlier assessment of the award as a sort of game whose outcome is dependent on the fluctuating tastes of the judging panel. For shortlisted authors full of "hope and lust and greed and expectation" he suggests treating the award as a lottery—that is, until you win and "realize that the judges are the wisest heads in literary Christendom."

This year's chair of judges, Stella Rimington, whose Booker jury faced criticism earlier this year about its prioritization of accessible books over those of high literary merit, called Barnes's book "very readable, if I may use the word." She added that it has "the markings of a classic of English literature. It is exquisitely written, subtly plotted and reveals new depths with each reading."

Barnes received fifty thousand pounds (approximately seventy-nine thousand dollars). The shortlisted authors each took home twenty-five hundred pounds (approximately thirty-nine thousand dollars).

In the video below, Barnes reacts to his win.

Ruth Gruber

Caption: 

"My father, he'd say, 'You have to have a career.' I said, 'I want to be a writer.'" Born in Brooklyn in 1911, Ruth Gruber became the youngest PhD in the world before going on to become an international foreign correspondent and photojournalist at age twenty-four. "Ahead of Time," a documentary by Bob Richman, tells the story of how Gruber defied tradition in an extraordinary career that has spanned more than seven decades.

Genre: 
Poetry
Fiction
Creative Nonfiction
Tags: 
documentary
Ruth Gruber

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