On July 23, Publisher’s Marketplace reported that agent Julie Barer of Barer Literary sold Nick Dybek's debut novel, When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man, after an auction during which five publishers made offers, to editor Sarah Bowlin at Riverhead Books.

Most writers, when they read news like this, assume such deals result from a combination of talent and luck. Often overlooked is the hard work put in by both author and agent, after they join forces, to make the manuscript submission-ready. We asked Dybek how the author-agent relationship worked in his case, and here’s what he had to say.

“By the time I began working with Julie Barer, I’d been scrubbing and polishing a novel for almost four years, and I felt the manuscript was almost as good as it would ever be. Julie’s warm and enthusiastic response to the book served to reinforce this delusion, at least at first. Consequently, when her revision letter and mark-up arrived a month later, suggesting what felt like a mountain of substantive changes and cuts, I have to admit my day was ruined. It wasn’t that I was unused to or resistant to criticism; years of writing workshops had given me calluses. But, for the first time, I didn’t have the option of ignoring those suggestions I instinctively, if inexplicably, resisted. ‘Give an editor an excuse to turn a project down,’ Julie often said, ‘and he will.’ Though she never demanded that I take her advice, she was seldom impressed by my flailing explanations as to why I wanted that paragraph or this scene or that chapter to stay the same.

"It took me four months to write a draft responding to Julie’s initial comments. And then, over a period of about nine months, with Julie’s patient help, I wrote another draft and another and another. This was some of the most difficult work I’ve ever done, at least partially because of how conflicted I felt about the process. Part of me was impatient, frustrated at having to address problems in the manuscript I wasn’t sure were problems, unsure that I could even bear to read a scene, a paragraph, a sentence again. But another part of me was purely and immensely grateful that a pro like Julie was taking my work so seriously, spending her weekends reading my manuscript for the second, third, fourth, and fifth times. Though many of the revisions I made were painful in the moment, I haven’t regretted a single one. And I realize now that Julie was holding my work to a standard that I should have held it to all along.”

The Arvon Poetry Prize, established thirty years ago by poet and husband of Sylvia Plath Ted Hughes, is now accepting entries. Until August 16, poets from around the world are invited to submit poems (with a seven-pound fee per piece) for the seventy-five-hundred-pound prize (a little less than twelve hundred dollars) sponsored by the British writing organization the Arvon Foundation.

Second- and third-place prizes of twenty-five hundred pounds and one thousand pounds, respectively, will also be given. Winners will be individually notified by October 1, and an announcement will be made in London on November 4.

The judges will be U.K. poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, who last year launched the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry won by Alice Oswald; Elaine Feinstein, poet, translator, and Hughes biographer whose first collection, The Circle (Faber Finds, 1970), was a semifinalist for the Lost Man Booker Prize; and Sudeep Sen, whose most recent collection is Letters of Glass (Wings Press, 2010).

For a list of previous winners (including former U.K. poet laureate Andrew Motion) and complete guidelines are available on the Arvon Foundation Web site.

In the video below, judge Duffy's poem "Mrs. Midas" is adapted in animation. The text of the poem is also available on the Web.

The semifinalists for the Man Booker Prize, which annually awards fifty thousand pounds (approximately seventy-eight thousand dollars) to a novelist writing in English, were announced yesterday. Thirteen writers from Australia, Canada, Ireland, England, Scotland, and South Africa are included in the 2010 longlist, selected by judges Rosie Blau, Financial Times literary editor; writer and dancer Deborah Bull; former U.K. poet laureate Andrew Motion; Independent columnist Tom Sutcliffe; and biographer and book reviewer Frances Wilson.

The semifinalists, whose novels were all published in U.K. editions in 2010 are:
Peter Carey for Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)
Emma Donoghue for Room (Picador)
Helen Dunmore for The Betrayal (Fig Tree)
Damon Galgut for In a Strange Room (Atlantic Books)
Howard Jacobson for The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)
Andrea Levy for The Long Song 
(Headline Review)
Tom McCarthy for C (Jonathan Cape)
David Mitchell for The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet  (Sceptre)
Lisa Moore for February (House of Anansi Press)
Paul Murray for Skippy Dies (Hamish Hamilton)
Rose Tremain for Trespass (Chatto & Windus)
Christos Tsiolkas for The Slap (Tuskar Rock)
Alan Warner for The Stars in the Bright Sky 
(Jonathan Cape)

The shortlist will be announced on September 7, and the winner will be named on October 12. More information about the longlisted books is available on the prize Web site.

In the video below, semifinalist Levy introduces and reads from The Long Song.

The University of Wales has announced the semifinalists for its annual Dylan Thomas Prize, given for a literary work in English by a writer of any nationality under the age of thirty. The 2010 longlist, which for the first time features a playwright—American Johnny Meyer—includes six poets and nine novelists from the Australia, Canada, Great Britain, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Somalia, South Africa, and the United States.

The longlisted poets are:
Caroline Bird, 23, for Watering Can (Carcanet)

Adebe D.A., 23, for Ex Nihilo (Frontenac House)
Elyse Fenton, 29, for Clamor (Cleveland State University Poetry Center)
Katharine Kilalea, 28, for One Eye'd Leigh (Carcanet)

Dora Malech, 28, for Shore Ordered Ocean (The Waywiser Press)

Leanne O'Sullivan, 27, for Cailleach (Bloodaxe Books)


The longlisted fiction writers are:
Eleanor Catton, 24, for The Rehearsal (Granta)
Brian DeLeeuw, 29, for In This Way I Was Saved (John Murray Publishers)
Ciara Hegarty, 29, for The Road to the Sea (Macmillan New Writing)
Emily Mackie, 27, for And This is True (Sceptre)

Karan Mahajan, 26, for Family Planning (Harper Perennial)

Nadifa Mohamed, 28, for Black Mamba Boy (Harper Collins)

Amy Sackville, 29, for The Still Point (Portobello Books)

Ali Shaw, 28, for The Girl with Glass Feet (Atlantic Books)

Craig Silvey, 27, for Jasper Jones (Windmill Books)

The winning writer, announced in Thomas's hometown of Swansea, Wales, on December 1, will receive a prize of thirty thousand pounds (approximately $46,700). Judging this year's award are Kate Burton, Peter Florence, Kurt Heinzelman, Gwyneth Lewis, Bruno Maddox, Natalie Moody, and Peter Stead.

In the video below, Somali-British novelist Mohamed discusses her debut, Black Mamba Boy, based on the life of her father. The book recently won the Society of Authors Betty Trask Prize, given to an author for travel abroad.