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Luis Alberto Urrea and Piers Vitebsky were recently named winners of the 2006 Kiriyama Prize. Urrea won in fiction for his novel The Hummingbird’s Daughter (Little, Brown) and Vitebsky won in creative nonfiction for his book The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia (Houghton Mifflin). The winners split the $30,000 award.
Bill Manhire is one of New Zealand’s most visible writers and certainly its most visible poet. The country’s inaugural poet laureate, Manhire is the author of more than ten books of poems, including Lifted, recently published by his long-time New Zealand publisher, Victoria University Press.
Led by council speaker Christine Quinn, members of the New York City Council recently honored poet John Ashbery for his “literary and cultural contributions” by designating April 7 as “John Ashbery Day” in the city.
Last month Businessweek, the Web site of the weekly business magazine, published a list of the ten best cities in the United States for artists, including creative writers. Los Angeles topped the list, followed by Santa Fe, New Mexico; Carson City, Nevada; New York City; Kingston, New York; Oxnard, Thousand Oaks, and Ventura, California; Nashville; Boulder, Colorado; San Francisco; and Nassau and Suffolk Counties in New York.
Fiction writers Deborah Eisenberg, Mary Gordon, Allan Gurganus, Jim Harrison, Harper Lee, and Annie Proulx were recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The 250-member organization was founded in 1898 to "foster, assist, and sustain an interest in literature, music, and the fine arts."
The Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the oldest continuously run poetry bookstore in the United States, was recently sold by owner Louisa Solano.
During the next several months, a number of festivals, exhibitions, and publications will mark the centennial of Samuel Beckett’s birth. Beckett, the poet, novelist, and playwright who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, was born in Dublin on April 13, 1906.
