Jump to navigation Skip to content
"Let us gather and be / silent together like stones / glittering in sunlight..." Marjory Wentworth, the poet laureate of the state of South Carolina, reads "Holy City," a poem dedicated to the lives lost at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina one year ago.
Carla Hayden close to securing Librarian of Congress appointment; fiction writer Max Porter on the fragmentary nature of grief; the vindication of Ernest Hemingway’s second wife; and other news.
"You can't be an activist or a writer or a public figure all day long, and I just have to be myself." Roxane Gay, author of the best-selling essay collection, Bad Feminist (Harper Perennial, 2014), talks about Twitter, adapting her novel, An Untamed State (Grove/Atlantic, 2014), to film, and the unexpected pressures of literary fame at the 2016 AWP conference and book fair in Los Angeles.
Fictional depictions of fatherhood; Australian publishers protest “open market” proposal; the emerging genre of Slut Lit; and other news.
"Maureen was seeking redemption." Lisa McInerney reads from her debut novel, The Glorious Heresies (John Murray, 2015), for which she was awarded the 2016 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.
From cities across the globe come reports of increasingly untraditional and casual fashion choices when it comes to getting married: brides in New York City who opt to wear wedding pants instead of a gown, and couples in Beijing showing up to the marriage registration office wearing “sleeveless shirts and shorts, or slippers.” Write a personal essay that examines the progression of your own clothing choices. Have you gone through phases when your outfits—whether influenced by a job, emotional state, or cultural shifts—were formal or informal, plain or adorned, monochromatic or colorful?
Irish author Lisa McInerney has been announced the winner of the 2016 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction for her debut novel, The Glorious Heresies (John Murray). The annual book award is open to women writers from anywhere in the world writing in English, and carries with it a £30,000 (approximately $43,500) prize.
The finalists were Cynthia Bond’s Ruby, Anne Enright’s The Green Road, Elizabeth McKenzie’s The Portable Veblen, Hannah Rothschild’s The Improbability of Love, and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life.
The judging panel consisted of five women: novelist Elif Şafak; journalists Naga Munchetty and Laurie Penny; writer and singer Tracey Thorn; and former lawyer and television personality Margaret Mountford, who served as judge chair. The committee selected McInerney’s novel from a hundred fifty entries.
McInerney’s novel tells the tale of how a messy murder affects the lives of “five misfits who live on the fringes of Ireland’s post-crash society.” At today’s award ceremony in London, Mountford said, “After a passionate discussion around a very strong shortlist, we chose Lisa McInerney’s The Glorious Heresies, a superbly original, compassionate novel that delivers insights into the very darkest of lives through humor and skillful storytelling. A fresh new voice and a wonderful winner.”
McInerney, thirty-four, began her writing career in 2006 with a personal blog called Arse End of Ireland, in which she documented working-class life in modern Ireland with a unique brand of cynical wit. The blog gained traction, and McInerney has since written for various Irish news and culture, feminist, and entertainment websites. Her short story, “Saturday, Boring,” was published in Faber & Faber’s Town and Country anthology in 2013. She lives in Galway.
Founded in 1996, the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction was established to recognize “excellence, originality, and accessibility in writing by women throughout the world.” The award is the U.K.’s most prestigious annual prize for a full-length book of fiction written by a woman. Previous winners include Ali Smith, Eimear McBride, Téa Obreht, and Zadie Smith. For more information, visit the prize website.
Website releases “definitive study” of U.S. author earnings; an interview with Iranian poet and translator Sholeh Wolpé; binge-worthy, serialized fiction; and other news.
In How to Write Like Tolstoy, Richard Cohen has assembled a compendium of techniques, obsessions, quotes, and exemplary passages by acclaimed prose writers including Agatha Christie, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Jonathan Franzen, David Markson, Gabriel García Márquez, and Francine Prose. Each of the twelve chapters focuses on a different element of craft, such as beginnings, point of view, dialogue, writing about sex, and revision, resulting in a book that illuminates for readers the range of perspectives in the writing of great literature.
This week, write a scene in which your main character experiences a series of coincidences over the course of a single day. Perhaps he sees the same stranger twice in one day, or finds that he is wearing the exact same outfit as someone he encounters. Is he eager to derive meaning from the occurrences, or does he dismiss them as possessing no significance? What is revealed about his personality by the response to these coincidences? Will he be proven wrong?
