Earlier this week, the Center for Fiction in New York City presented its (newly-renamed) Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize to a decorated veteran of the U.S. Marines whose debut novel tells a story informed by his time serving in Vietnam. Author Karl Marlantes received the ten-thousand-dollar award for his book, Matterhorn (Grove/Atlantic), selected by jurors Oscar Hijuelos, Sheila Kohler, John Pipkin, Dawn Raffel, and John Wray.

Also this week, United States Artists announced its 2010 fellows. Honored this year with awards of fifty thousand dollars each are poet Martín Espada, whose collection Trouble Ball is forthcoming in 2011 from Norton; poet and translator Khaled Mattawa, whose most recent book is Tocqueville (New Issues Poetry and Prose); poet Brighde Mullins, also a playwright, author of the chapbook Water Stories (Slapering Hol Press, 2003), and fiction writer Susan Steinberg, whose most recent short story collection is Hydroplane (Fiction Collective Two, 2006).

The awards honor artistic excellence in the field, determined by a panel of writers' peers. Fellowships are also given annually to playwrights, dramatists, filmmakers, visual artists, folk artists, and musicians—thirty in all this year.

In the video below, USA fellow Steinberg performs her story "Powerhouse" at a reading for the Rumpus.

The Spanish Ministry of Culture announced recently that its Cervantes Prize, given annually to a Spanish or Latin American writer for lifetime achievement, will go to for the third time to a woman—Spanish novelist Ana María Matute. The eighty-five-year-old author of The Lost Children (MacMillan, 1965) and Soldiers Cry at Night (Latin American Literary Review Press, 1995) will receive her award of 125,000 euros (approximately $165,000) on the 395th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra on April 23, 2011.

"I am happy, enormously happy," Matute said in response to the announcement of her award. "I take it as a recognition, if not of the quality of my work, then at least of the effort and dedication that I have devoted to writing throughout my life."

Matute joins on the short list of women honorees Cuban-born poet Dulce María Loynaz, whose works have been collected in English translation most recently in Against Heaven (Carcanet Press, 2007) and Woman in Her Garden (White Pine Press, 2002), and Spanish essayist María Zambrano, one of whose books, Delirium and Destiny: A Spaniard in Her Twenties, was published in translation by State University of New York Press in 1999. Other past winners of the Cervantes Prize include Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, José Emilio Pacheco, Octavio Paz, and this year's Nobel Prize winner, Mario Vargas Llosa.

Among Matute's works in English, in addition to the titles above, are Celebration in the Northwest (University of Nebraska Press, 1997), Trap (Latin American Literary Review Press, 1996), and School of the Sun (Pantheon, 1963). According to the Spanish Ministry of Culture, her books have been translated into twenty-three languages.