Jump to navigation Skip to content
The first volume of the Glimmer Train Guide to Writing Fiction series collects excerpts from over a hundred interviews by authors including Sandra Cisneros, Jamaica Kincaid, and Tobias Wolff. In short passages, writers share their thoughts on topics such as plot, theme, and dialogue, all conveniently divided by chapters.
Keep your ears open this week, and write down an intriguing phrase that you overhear. This might be a snippet of a sentence exchanged between two people talking, a few words spoken by someone on the phone next to you, or even part of a loudspeaker announcement. Spend some time imagining what led up to that remark. Then write the rest of the story making the overheard phrase your last sentence.
From left: Melissa Faliveno of Poets & Writers, Jeff Pfaller of Midwestern Gothic, Don Share of Poetry, Adrienne Gunn of TriQuarterly, and Ben Tanzer of Curbside Splendor.
Adrienne Gunn of TriQuarterly discusses her work as a literary journal editor on June 20, 2015.
During the Editors panel, Don Share discusses his role as the editor of Poetry magazine.
An audience member, poet Jessica Walsh, gets advice from a surprise guest (Michael Wiegers, executive editor of Copper Canyon Press) during the Perfect Pitch Panel in Chicago on June 20, 2015.
This morning, the Man Booker Foundation announced that beginning in 2016, the Man Booker International Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize will merge to form one annual award for an individual work of fiction translated into English. The reconfigured Man Booker International Prize will divide an award of £50,000 equally between author and translator. Each of the six shortlisted authors and translators will also receive £1,000.
Established in 2005, the Man Booker International Prize has until now awarded one prize of £60,000 biennially to “a living author for a body of work representing an achievement in fiction on the world stage.” Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai won the prize in 2015. The annual Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (IFFP), meanwhile, honored a single work of fiction translated into English. A prize of £10,000 was split equally between author and translator. The 2015 winner was Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days (Portobello Books), translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky.
Jonathan Taylor, chair of the Booker Prize Foundation, said in a press conference that the Man Booker International Prize loses momentum by being awarded every two years instead of annually, and hopes the “reconfiguration of the prize will encourage a greater interest and investment in translation."
Independent senior writer Boyd Tonkin will serve as the 2016 Man Booker International Prize chair. The longlist for the new Man Booker International Prize will be announced in March 2016, followed by the shortlist announcement in April; the winner will be announced in May. Books translated into English and published between January 1, 2015, and April 30, 2016, are eligible for the award.
Publicist Michael Taeckens critiques an audience member's query letter during the Perfect Pitch panel.
Literary agent Renée Zuckerbrot responds to a query letter written by an audience member during the Perfect Pitch panel.
Perfect Pitch panelists Michael Taeckens, a publicist at Broadside: Expert Literary PR, and Jeff Kleinman of Folio Literary Management.
