Yesterday U.K. poet and gardener Alice Oswald received the first Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for her collection Weeds and Wildflowers (Faber and Faber). Last July British poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy launched the new award, which comes with a five-thousand-pound prize (approximately $7,500) funded with her laureate stipend. The prize will be given annually to a living U.K. poet throughout the remainder of Duffy's ten-year term.

On this side of the pond, a cast of literary honorees was announced earlier this week by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. New Jersey poet Gerald Stern won the academy's Award of Merit Medal for Poetry, a ten-thousand-dollar prize that honors a writer's oeuvre. Tim O'Brien, author of the story collection The Things They Carried (Houghton Mifflin, 1990), won the twenty-thousand-dollar Katherine Anne Porter Award for lifetime achievement.

Daniyal Mueenuddin, who recently won the Story Prize, was recognized for his debut collection, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Norton), with the ten-thousand-dollar Rosenthal Family Foundation Award. Debut author Josh Weil won the five-thousand-dollar Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction for his novella collection, The New Valley (Grove Press).

The academy gave $7,500 Academy Awards in Literature to poets Peter Cole, Peter Everwine, and Bruce Smith; fiction writer Steve Erickson; and translator Natasha Wimmer, who has lately received attention for her translation of 2666 and other works by Roberto Bolaño. Playwright Jean Young Lee and biographer Blake Bailey also received the prize.

British fiction writer Dan Rhodes won the E. M. Forster Award, which offers a young writer twenty thousand dollars to fund a stay in the United States, and American writers Jay Hopler, a Salt Lake City poet, and Heather McGowan, a novelist living in New York City, each received a fellowship that offers a one-year residency at the American Academy in Rome.

Poet and art critic Peter Schjeldahl was honored by the academy for the style of his prose, which has appeared in cultural forums such as the New Yorker as well as in several books, with the ten-thousand-dollar Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award.

In the video below, Hughes Award winner Alice Oswald and shortlisted poet Paul Farley join an assembly of other poets in reciting Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," which, incidentally, Hughes included in his poetry anthology The Rattle Bag (Faber and Faber, 1982), coedited by Seamus Heaney.

The Center for Fiction in New York City announced yesterday that Jamaica Kincaid has won the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Kincaid's 1985 novel Annie John (Hill and Wang), the story of a young girl growing up in the author's native Antigua, was selected by Pulitzer Prize–winner Jane Smiley, as the recipient of the five-thousand-dollar award, which honors books published at least ten years ago that are "deserving of rediscovery and a wider readership."

Previous Fadiman winners include Lore Segal for Other People's Houses, selected by Cynthia Ozick; Robert Coover for Pricksongs and Descants, selected by T. C. Boyle; and James Purdy for Eustace Chisholm and the Works, selected by Jonathan Franzen.

Smiley will present the award to Kincaid on April 14 at the Center for Fiction. Tickets for the event are fifteen dollars, and can be purchased on the center's Web site.

There are two days remaining to submit essays for a competition that will award four writers tickets to a performance by essayist David Sedaris in Chicago. Cooler by the Lake, the online magazine of StoryStudio Chicago writing and arts center, will accept entries of "funny, humorous, poignant" essays through Friday.

The winners each will receive two tickets to Sedaris's show on April 17 at the Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University, and their essays will be published in Cooler by the Lake. StoryStudio will notify winners, who will be responsible for their own travel and lodging, by April 2.

In the recording below, originally broadcast on Chicago Public Radio's This American Life, the author of essay collections Me Talk Pretty One Day (Little, Brown, 2000) and When You Are Engulfed in Flames (Little, Brown, 2008), among others, tells a story from his childhood.

Black Lawrence Press, publisher of contemporary literature and an imprint of nonprofit press Dzanc Books, is winding down its submissions period for the annual Hudson Prize. The competition is open to collections of both poetry and short stories, but no matter its genre, the work, according to executive editor Diane Goettel, should aim to rock readers on a visceral level.

Goettel responded to our question about what the editors, who will serve as judges, will be looking for in a manuscript by recalling one blurber's reaction to the book of a former prizewinner—Jason Tandon. Tandon won the press's debut book prize, the St. Lawrence Book Award, in 2006. "In his blurb for Give Over the Heckler and Everyone Gets Hurt, Todd Zuniga said that Tandon's poems caused him to ache—'an "I'm-happy-to-be-alive" ache, an "I'm-glad-writing-like-this-exists" ache.' That's what we are looking for in submissions to The Hudson Prize: writing that makes us ache."

The winning manuscript will be published by Black Lawrence Press, and the winner will receive one thousand dollars. Entries may be of any length, and should be sent via e-mail by March 31. More information about this and other competitions going on now is available in our Grants & Awards database.

To read a poem from Tandon's winning collection, visit the online archives of Opium Magazine, of which Zuniga is editor.

Earlier today Sherman Alexie was named winner of the fifteen-thousand-dollar PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his "structurally inventive" short story collection War Dances (Grove Press). Judges Rilla Askew, Kyoko Mori, and Al Young selected Alexie's book, which interweaves poetry with prose, from among roughly 350 novels and short story collections nominated by publishers.

Also receiving honors are finalists Barbara Kingsolver, nominated for her novel The Lacuna (Harper); Lorraine M. Lopez, for Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories (BkMk Press); Lorrie Moore, for her novel A Gate at the Stairs (Knopf); and Colson Whitehead, for his novel Sag Harbor (Doubleday), each of whom will be awarded five thousand dollars. The honorees will all be celebrated at the thirtieth anniversary award ceremony on May 8 at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., where the PEN/Faulkner Foundation is based.

Alexie, the first Native American to win the prize, joins a roster of award alumni that includes Kate Christensen, Ha Jin, Joyce Carol Oates, Joseph O'Neill, Ann Patchett, Annie Proulx, Marilynne Robinson, Philip Roth, and John Updike.