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On August 14 the judges of the 2006 Booker Prize announced a list of nineteen semifinalists. The annual prize, worth £50,000 (approximately $94,900), is sponsored by the Man Group investment company and is given for the best novel of the year by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or Ireland.
Nobel Prize-winning novelist Günter Grass recently revealed that he served in the Waffen Schutzstaffel (SS), the elite military combat wing of the Nazi party.
Five authors are among this year's Celebrity 100, a ranking of the highest earning and most popular celebrities in the world, published annually by Forbes magazine.
Poet James Arthur recently received the $47,000 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship.
Amazon.com recently optioned screen rights to Keith Donohue's best-selling debut novel The Stolen Child (Nan A. Talese, 2006). It is the online retailer's first venture into feature films and the creation of content not limited to its Web site.
HarperCollins Publishers today introduced a program on its Web site called "Browse Inside," which allows readers to view the first three pages of most chapters in over a hundred HarperCollins titles, including books by Isabel Allende, Michael Crichton, and C. S. Lewis.
Perseus Books Group announced yesterday that it had acquired Consortium Books Sales and Distribution, Inc., the company that provides distribution, sales, and marketing services to independent publishers such as Akashic Books, Copper Canyon Press, and Seven Stories Press.
Novelists Salman Rushdie, Hari Kunzru, and Lisa Appignanesi recently spoke out against protests of the filming in London of the movie adaptation of Monica Ali's debut novel Brick Lane, published by Scribner in 2003.
Poet David Rivard recently won the Folger Shakespeare Library’s 2006 O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize. Rivard, whose most recent collection is Sugartown (Graywolf Press, 2006), received $10,000 and an invitation to read at the library in Washington, D.C.
Production of the movie based on Monica Ali's debut novel Brick Lane, published by Scribner in 2003, was halted on July 26 after protesters threatened to blockade London streets where scenes were scheduled to be filmed.
