from wikipedia accessed 6/27/13
The Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence is administered by the BC Book Prizes and recognizes a writer who has contributed significantly to the development of literary excellence in British Columbia, as well as having written a substantial body of literary work throughout his or her career.
The recipient receives a cash award of $5,000 and a commemorative certificate.
The Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence was first conceived in the spring of 2002. Led by the late Carol Shields, a group of respected BC writers met with the current Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia, the Honourable Iona Campagnolo to initiate a special provincial literary arts award. Inspired by Shields, this meeting resulted in the establishment of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence.
2004 - P.K. Page
2005 - Robert Bringhurst
2006 - Jack Hodgins
2007 - Patrick Lane
2008 - Gary Geddes
2009 - Terry Glavin
2010 - Stan Persky
2011 - George Bowering
2012 - Brian Brett
2013 - Lorna Crozier and Sarah Ellis
Showing posts with label Authors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Authors. Show all posts
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (2003-2013)
Info from The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award and wikipedia accessed 6/19/13
The award was established in 2002 by the Swedish government following the death of Pippi Longstocking author Lindgren, aged 94, and is given to a body of work "in the spirit of Astrid Lindgren, with a focus on a profound respect for democratic values and human rights". Previous winners include Philip Pullman, Maurice Sendak and Sonya Hartnett.
"It's nice to be on the list but I'm not going to hold my breath," said Chambers. "I've been on it every year since it started [so] my form is not too good. If I were a racehorse, I wouldn't be backing me."
The winner of the prize, selected by a 12-member jury of experts in children's literature and children's rights, including a member of Lindgren's family is announced in March at Lindgren's birth place in Vimmerby, Sweden.
Year Winner Country
2003 Maurice Sendak United States & Christine Nöstlinger Austria
2004 Lygia Bojunga Nunes Brazil
2005 Philip Pullman United Kingdom & Ryōji Arai Japan
2006 Katherine Paterson United States
2007 Banco del Libro Venezuela
2008 Sonya Hartnett Australia
2009 Tamer Institute for Community Education Palestine
2010 Kitty Crowther - Belgium
2011 Shaun Tan - Australia
2012 Guus Kuijer - Netherlands
2013 Isol - Argentina
The award was established in 2002 by the Swedish government following the death of Pippi Longstocking author Lindgren, aged 94, and is given to a body of work "in the spirit of Astrid Lindgren, with a focus on a profound respect for democratic values and human rights". Previous winners include Philip Pullman, Maurice Sendak and Sonya Hartnett.
"It's nice to be on the list but I'm not going to hold my breath," said Chambers. "I've been on it every year since it started [so] my form is not too good. If I were a racehorse, I wouldn't be backing me."
The winner of the prize, selected by a 12-member jury of experts in children's literature and children's rights, including a member of Lindgren's family is announced in March at Lindgren's birth place in Vimmerby, Sweden.
Year Winner Country
2003 Maurice Sendak United States & Christine Nöstlinger Austria
2004 Lygia Bojunga Nunes Brazil
2005 Philip Pullman United Kingdom & Ryōji Arai Japan
2006 Katherine Paterson United States
2007 Banco del Libro Venezuela
2008 Sonya Hartnett Australia
2009 Tamer Institute for Community Education Palestine
2010 Kitty Crowther - Belgium
2011 Shaun Tan - Australia
2012 Guus Kuijer - Netherlands
2013 Isol - Argentina
Friday, January 7, 2011
Writers' Trust of Canada prize (2009-10)
2010 info from Quill & Quire accessed 1/7/11
2010 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing shortlist
Tim Cook for The Madman and the Butcher: The Sensational Wars of Sam Hughes and General Arthur Currie
Shelagh D. Grant for Polar Imperative: A History of Arctic Sovereignty in North America
Lawrence Martin for Harperland: The Politics of Control
Anna Porter for The Ghosts of Europe: Journeys Through Central Europe’s Troubled Past and Uncertain Future
Doug Saunders for Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World
The winner will be announced on Feb. 16 at the Politics and the Pen Gala in Ottawa.
The 2009 shortlist for the Writers' Trust of Canada prizes, according to the National Post, includes:
Fiction
Fences in Breathing by Nicole Brossard, translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood
Generation A by Douglas Coupland
The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon
Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro -- short stories
Eva's Threepenny Theatre by Andrew Steinmetz
Nonfiction
Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life by Brian Brett
The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World by Wade Davis
Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds by Trevor Herriot
The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath: Some Paradoxes of Human-Animal Relationships by Erika Ritter
The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece by Eric Siblin
2010 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing shortlist
Tim Cook for The Madman and the Butcher: The Sensational Wars of Sam Hughes and General Arthur Currie
Shelagh D. Grant for Polar Imperative: A History of Arctic Sovereignty in North America
Lawrence Martin for Harperland: The Politics of Control
Anna Porter for The Ghosts of Europe: Journeys Through Central Europe’s Troubled Past and Uncertain Future
Doug Saunders for Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World
The winner will be announced on Feb. 16 at the Politics and the Pen Gala in Ottawa.
The 2009 shortlist for the Writers' Trust of Canada prizes, according to the National Post, includes:
Fiction
Fences in Breathing by Nicole Brossard, translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood
Generation A by Douglas Coupland
The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon
Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro -- short stories
Eva's Threepenny Theatre by Andrew Steinmetz
Nonfiction
Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life by Brian Brett
The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World by Wade Davis
Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds by Trevor Herriot
The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath: Some Paradoxes of Human-Animal Relationships by Erika Ritter
The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece by Eric Siblin
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Cervantes Prize (1976-2010)
Information form Wikipedia accessed 12/9/11
The Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spanish: Premio Miguel de Cervantes), established in 1976, is awarded annually to honour the lifetime achievement of an outstanding writer in the Spanish language. The prize is similar to the Booker Prize, with its candidates from Commonwealth countries, in that it rewards authors from any Spanish-speaking nation. Unlike the Booker Prize, it is awarded only once in recognition of the recipient's overall body of work and is therefore regarded as a sort of Spanish-language Nobel Prize in Literature. The award is named after Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote.
The candidates are proposed by the Language Academies of the Spanish-speaking countries, and the prize is awarded by the Ministry of Culture of Spain. The winner receives a monetary award of 125,000 euros.
1976 Jorge Guillén Spain
1977 Alejo Carpentier Cuba
1978 Dámaso Alonso Spain
1979 Jorge Luis Borges Argentina
1979 Gerardo Diego Spain
1980 Juan Carlos Onetti Uruguay
1981 Octavio Paz Mexico
1982 Luis Rosales Spain
1983 Rafael Alberti Spain
1984 Ernesto Sabato Argentina
1985 Gonzalo Torrente Ballester Spain
1986 Antonio Buero Vallejo Spain
1987 Carlos Fuentes Mexico
1988 María Zambrano Spain
1989 Augusto Roa Bastos Paraguay
1990 Adolfo Bioy Casares Argentina
1991 Francisco Ayala Spain
1992 Dulce María Loynaz Cuba
1993 Miguel Delibes Spain
1994 Mario Vargas Llosa Peru
1995 Camilo José Cela Spain
1996 José García Nieto Spain
1997 Guillermo Cabrera Infante Cuba
1998 José Hierro Spain
1999 Jorge Edwards Chile
2000 Francisco Umbral Spain
2001 Álvaro Mutis Colombia
2002 José Jiménez Lozano Spain
2003 Gonzalo Rojas Chile
2004 Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio Spain
2005 Sergio Pitol Mexico
2006 Antonio Gamoneda Spain
2007 Juan Gelman Argentina
2008 Juan Marsé Spain
2009 José Emilio Pacheco Mexico
2010 Ana María Matute Spain
The Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spanish: Premio Miguel de Cervantes), established in 1976, is awarded annually to honour the lifetime achievement of an outstanding writer in the Spanish language. The prize is similar to the Booker Prize, with its candidates from Commonwealth countries, in that it rewards authors from any Spanish-speaking nation. Unlike the Booker Prize, it is awarded only once in recognition of the recipient's overall body of work and is therefore regarded as a sort of Spanish-language Nobel Prize in Literature. The award is named after Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote.
The candidates are proposed by the Language Academies of the Spanish-speaking countries, and the prize is awarded by the Ministry of Culture of Spain. The winner receives a monetary award of 125,000 euros.
1976 Jorge Guillén Spain
1977 Alejo Carpentier Cuba
1978 Dámaso Alonso Spain
1979 Jorge Luis Borges Argentina
1979 Gerardo Diego Spain
1980 Juan Carlos Onetti Uruguay
1981 Octavio Paz Mexico
1982 Luis Rosales Spain
1983 Rafael Alberti Spain
1984 Ernesto Sabato Argentina
1985 Gonzalo Torrente Ballester Spain
1986 Antonio Buero Vallejo Spain
1987 Carlos Fuentes Mexico
1988 María Zambrano Spain
1989 Augusto Roa Bastos Paraguay
1990 Adolfo Bioy Casares Argentina
1991 Francisco Ayala Spain
1992 Dulce María Loynaz Cuba
1993 Miguel Delibes Spain
1994 Mario Vargas Llosa Peru
1995 Camilo José Cela Spain
1996 José García Nieto Spain
1997 Guillermo Cabrera Infante Cuba
1998 José Hierro Spain
1999 Jorge Edwards Chile
2000 Francisco Umbral Spain
2001 Álvaro Mutis Colombia
2002 José Jiménez Lozano Spain
2003 Gonzalo Rojas Chile
2004 Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio Spain
2005 Sergio Pitol Mexico
2006 Antonio Gamoneda Spain
2007 Juan Gelman Argentina
2008 Juan Marsé Spain
2009 José Emilio Pacheco Mexico
2010 Ana María Matute Spain
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Joshua Henkin's Novels About Writers, Writing, and the Writing Life
Joshua Henkin’s Ten Terrific Novels About Writers, Writing, and the Writing Life
from Conversational Reading, accessed 10/23/10
(Today we have a guest post from novelist Joshua Henkin. Henkin’s novel, Matrimony, about MFA students and writing about writing (among other things), is out in paperback.)
Opening Disclaimer: These are ordered randomly and not to be construed as a Top-Ten list or even as a Ten-Personal-Favorites list, just ten works of fiction I plain like and thought I’d share with you at Conversational Reading.
Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon. Often forgotten in the publishing hoopla surrounding Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Chabon was just out of college when MOP was published) and the attention he has gotten for his later novels are some finely wrought stories collected in A Model World, and The Wonder Boys, a high-wire comedic novel that takes place at a writing conference and is said to be based loosely on the life of Chuck Kinder, one of Chabon’s undergraduate writing professors. This is difficult material to mine afresh—making fun of writing conferences is both easy and familiar—and, in general, it’s hard to do farce without becoming, well, farcical. But Chabon does it. Some outrageous things happen, but Chabon’s language and narrative are always under his control.
The Information by Martin Amis. Amis is one of the writers I mention when my writing students complain about unlikable characters. Has Amis ever written a “likable” character? (Actually, I like a lot of Amis’s characters, but that’s another matter, and the whole question of likeability tends to be a red herring.) Although his work is uneven, the best of it is first-rate. I would include The Information in that category, a novel about literary success and failure, and about envy and backstabbing and other such things. On those occasions when I’m interviewed and asked what Matrimony is about (often by someone who hasn’t read the book: if they’d read it, they wouldn’t need to ask), I think of Amis’s protagonist, on book tour, who responds to one interviewer (I’m going on memory here) in the following way: “The book is what it is. All two hundred thousand words of it. If I could have said it in fewer words, I would have.”
Men in Black by Scott Spencer. Speaking of book tours, Spencer’s novel chronicles the personal and professional woes of Sam Holland, a literary novelist whose books don’t sell and who writes a pseudonymous book about UFOs that catapults him to literary stardom. Although the send-up of literary success is often amusing, what distinguishes Spencer’s book is less the material about the writing life than Spencer’s portrait of middle-aged-white-guy anxiety/crisis/desperation, a subject done so often it can be tiresome, but which Spencer does much better than most, certainly much better than a lot of writers who have gotten more attention than he has. (Another novel that does this really well, though not a book about writing, is Preston Falls by David Gates. Gates’s Jernigan is very good too, but I like Preston Falls better). Spencer may be best known for writing an apparently good book (I never read it) that got turned into such a terrible movie it cast a negative retroactive light on the book itself. I’m talking about Endless Love (a movie that, incidentally, marks Tom Cruise’s film debut), the 1981 picture starring sixteen-year-old Brooke Shields, a year after her soft porn performance opposite Christopher Atkins in Blue Lagoon. When I tried to reassure a writer friend of mine, anxious over the way the movie version of his book was turning out, that even a bad movie helps a book, he said, “Just as long as I don’t get Scott Spencered.”
“Family Furnishings” by Alice Munro. Not a novel, but there’s more packed into a forty-page Munro story than into most 400-page novels. Reading a Munro story is like peeling an onion and finding layer after layer beneath it: no story of hers is quite what it seems to be at first. At Brooklyn College’s MFA program, where I teach, the ten-or-so-member faculty was asked to make a list of ten works of fiction that were most influential to them, and Munro was on more lists than any other writer. “Family Furnishings,” like a number of recent Munro stories, chronicles the writing life and feels closer to home than some of Munro’s earlier work. It’s a stunning story. There’s a powerful and shocking moment in which the writer protagonist uses a character from her own life for the purposes of her fiction, to disastrous consequences. The story is also wonderful at depicting the pain that goes hand in hand with outgrowing your small-town roots, and your family along with it. For more on “Family Furnishings,” have a look at Lorrie Moore’s review of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage in the New York Review of Books.
Atonement by Ian McEwan. Speaking of the New York Review of Books, John Banville, in his evisceration of Saturday, which he called “a dismayingly bad book,” also said that “the first half of Atonement alone [will] ensure [McEwan] a lasting place in English letters.” And the second half of the book isn’t too bad, either. Atonement was a great novel long before it got turned into a blockbuster move and thereby earned a spot on the reading list of every book club in the country, but this is a case where the commercial success is well deserved. My wife, a better (and certainly more-difficult-to-please) critic than I am (when she likes something I’ve written, I know I’m on safe ground), stayed up all night during our honeymoon in an un-air-conditioned hotel room in Ho Chi Minh City reading Atonement from cover to cover. I’d never seen her do that before, and I haven’t since. It’s impossible to know, of course, what books from today will be read a hundred years from now, or if people will be reading books at all, but if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on Atonement.
The Hours, by Michael Cunningham. Cunningham, who in his most recent novel Specimen Days has done for Walt Whitman (Specimen Days is divided into a ghost story, a thriller, and a post-apocalyptic tale, all presided over by the figure of Whitman) what he did for Virginia Woolf in The Hours, which won the Pulitzer in 1999. Essentially three novellas linked through the figure, life, and work of Virginia Woolf, The Hours does many things wonderfully, not least of which is the way Cunningham captures Woolf’s own struggles to find the right opening for Mrs. Dalloway. And his description of Woolf’s suicide is utterly haunting. I’ll never forget it.
Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. After reading Matrimony, a number of critics and interviewers asked me whether I’d been influenced by Crossing to Safety. I hadn’t been consciously, but books have their way of worming themselves into your subconscious, so I went back and reread it, and, Sure enough. In a mere 350 pages, Stegner chronicles the life of two couples over the course of more than fifty years. It’s a book about the writing life and about academia, but also about friendship, and the ways success and failure can inflict damage on a person’s friendships. From a craft perspective, too, the novel is extremely interesting. Take a look at the way Stegner uses what I’d call a speculative/hypothetical point of view.
Starting Out in the Evening by Brian Morton. Morton has carved out a niche for himself, writing elegant, quiet novels about writers and the writing life. His prose is filled with feeling, and in his recent novel Breakable You he writes extremely powerfully about the despair surrounding a child’s illness. I admire all his books, and Starting Out in the Evening is probably my favorite. It was recently turned into a movie starring Frank Langella and Lili Taylor.
Blue Angel by Francine Prose. When I sat down to write the writing workshop scenes in Matrimony, I went back to the writing workshop scenes in Blue Angel, having remembered how vividly they were done. I got caught up in the book and reread the whole thing. It’s a wonderful, lacerating academic satire that skewers everything about academic and writing life, most especially P.C. culture. For another Francine Prose writing book, this one not a novel, read Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People who Love Books. It’s a high-level, sophisticated exploration of the way a writer reads, and, unbelievably, it found its way onto the New York Times Bestseller list. Or perhaps not so unbelievably: a recent USA Today poll revealed that 82 percent of Americans either have written or would like to write a book.
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald’s novel, which is set in late-eighteenth-century Germany, is based on the life of a young philosophy student who will eventually become famous as the Romantic poet Novalis. It’s about a brilliant young man who falls in love with a dolt of a twelve-year-old girl, to the horror of his friends and family. To my mind, it’s a near-perfect book, and though it was clearly assiduously researched, Fitzgerald wears her knowledge lightly. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1997 over finalists Underworld by Don Delillo, Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andre Makine, Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, and American Pastoral by Philip Roth. There were a few grumblings at the time (Underworld had been the favorite in some circles), revived more recently when someone (one of the judges? I can’t remember exactly) suggested that The Blue Flower had been a compromise choice and that a smaller, less ambitious novel had won out over a book that swung for the fences. No disrespect meant to Delillo or any of the others, but The Blue Flower, though it comes in at just over 200 pages, is neither small nor unambitious. Would people have said the same thing if the writer had been a man?
from Conversational Reading, accessed 10/23/10
(Today we have a guest post from novelist Joshua Henkin. Henkin’s novel, Matrimony, about MFA students and writing about writing (among other things), is out in paperback.)
Opening Disclaimer: These are ordered randomly and not to be construed as a Top-Ten list or even as a Ten-Personal-Favorites list, just ten works of fiction I plain like and thought I’d share with you at Conversational Reading.
Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon. Often forgotten in the publishing hoopla surrounding Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Chabon was just out of college when MOP was published) and the attention he has gotten for his later novels are some finely wrought stories collected in A Model World, and The Wonder Boys, a high-wire comedic novel that takes place at a writing conference and is said to be based loosely on the life of Chuck Kinder, one of Chabon’s undergraduate writing professors. This is difficult material to mine afresh—making fun of writing conferences is both easy and familiar—and, in general, it’s hard to do farce without becoming, well, farcical. But Chabon does it. Some outrageous things happen, but Chabon’s language and narrative are always under his control.
The Information by Martin Amis. Amis is one of the writers I mention when my writing students complain about unlikable characters. Has Amis ever written a “likable” character? (Actually, I like a lot of Amis’s characters, but that’s another matter, and the whole question of likeability tends to be a red herring.) Although his work is uneven, the best of it is first-rate. I would include The Information in that category, a novel about literary success and failure, and about envy and backstabbing and other such things. On those occasions when I’m interviewed and asked what Matrimony is about (often by someone who hasn’t read the book: if they’d read it, they wouldn’t need to ask), I think of Amis’s protagonist, on book tour, who responds to one interviewer (I’m going on memory here) in the following way: “The book is what it is. All two hundred thousand words of it. If I could have said it in fewer words, I would have.”
Men in Black by Scott Spencer. Speaking of book tours, Spencer’s novel chronicles the personal and professional woes of Sam Holland, a literary novelist whose books don’t sell and who writes a pseudonymous book about UFOs that catapults him to literary stardom. Although the send-up of literary success is often amusing, what distinguishes Spencer’s book is less the material about the writing life than Spencer’s portrait of middle-aged-white-guy anxiety/crisis/desperation, a subject done so often it can be tiresome, but which Spencer does much better than most, certainly much better than a lot of writers who have gotten more attention than he has. (Another novel that does this really well, though not a book about writing, is Preston Falls by David Gates. Gates’s Jernigan is very good too, but I like Preston Falls better). Spencer may be best known for writing an apparently good book (I never read it) that got turned into such a terrible movie it cast a negative retroactive light on the book itself. I’m talking about Endless Love (a movie that, incidentally, marks Tom Cruise’s film debut), the 1981 picture starring sixteen-year-old Brooke Shields, a year after her soft porn performance opposite Christopher Atkins in Blue Lagoon. When I tried to reassure a writer friend of mine, anxious over the way the movie version of his book was turning out, that even a bad movie helps a book, he said, “Just as long as I don’t get Scott Spencered.”
“Family Furnishings” by Alice Munro. Not a novel, but there’s more packed into a forty-page Munro story than into most 400-page novels. Reading a Munro story is like peeling an onion and finding layer after layer beneath it: no story of hers is quite what it seems to be at first. At Brooklyn College’s MFA program, where I teach, the ten-or-so-member faculty was asked to make a list of ten works of fiction that were most influential to them, and Munro was on more lists than any other writer. “Family Furnishings,” like a number of recent Munro stories, chronicles the writing life and feels closer to home than some of Munro’s earlier work. It’s a stunning story. There’s a powerful and shocking moment in which the writer protagonist uses a character from her own life for the purposes of her fiction, to disastrous consequences. The story is also wonderful at depicting the pain that goes hand in hand with outgrowing your small-town roots, and your family along with it. For more on “Family Furnishings,” have a look at Lorrie Moore’s review of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage in the New York Review of Books.
Atonement by Ian McEwan. Speaking of the New York Review of Books, John Banville, in his evisceration of Saturday, which he called “a dismayingly bad book,” also said that “the first half of Atonement alone [will] ensure [McEwan] a lasting place in English letters.” And the second half of the book isn’t too bad, either. Atonement was a great novel long before it got turned into a blockbuster move and thereby earned a spot on the reading list of every book club in the country, but this is a case where the commercial success is well deserved. My wife, a better (and certainly more-difficult-to-please) critic than I am (when she likes something I’ve written, I know I’m on safe ground), stayed up all night during our honeymoon in an un-air-conditioned hotel room in Ho Chi Minh City reading Atonement from cover to cover. I’d never seen her do that before, and I haven’t since. It’s impossible to know, of course, what books from today will be read a hundred years from now, or if people will be reading books at all, but if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on Atonement.
The Hours, by Michael Cunningham. Cunningham, who in his most recent novel Specimen Days has done for Walt Whitman (Specimen Days is divided into a ghost story, a thriller, and a post-apocalyptic tale, all presided over by the figure of Whitman) what he did for Virginia Woolf in The Hours, which won the Pulitzer in 1999. Essentially three novellas linked through the figure, life, and work of Virginia Woolf, The Hours does many things wonderfully, not least of which is the way Cunningham captures Woolf’s own struggles to find the right opening for Mrs. Dalloway. And his description of Woolf’s suicide is utterly haunting. I’ll never forget it.
Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. After reading Matrimony, a number of critics and interviewers asked me whether I’d been influenced by Crossing to Safety. I hadn’t been consciously, but books have their way of worming themselves into your subconscious, so I went back and reread it, and, Sure enough. In a mere 350 pages, Stegner chronicles the life of two couples over the course of more than fifty years. It’s a book about the writing life and about academia, but also about friendship, and the ways success and failure can inflict damage on a person’s friendships. From a craft perspective, too, the novel is extremely interesting. Take a look at the way Stegner uses what I’d call a speculative/hypothetical point of view.
Starting Out in the Evening by Brian Morton. Morton has carved out a niche for himself, writing elegant, quiet novels about writers and the writing life. His prose is filled with feeling, and in his recent novel Breakable You he writes extremely powerfully about the despair surrounding a child’s illness. I admire all his books, and Starting Out in the Evening is probably my favorite. It was recently turned into a movie starring Frank Langella and Lili Taylor.
Blue Angel by Francine Prose. When I sat down to write the writing workshop scenes in Matrimony, I went back to the writing workshop scenes in Blue Angel, having remembered how vividly they were done. I got caught up in the book and reread the whole thing. It’s a wonderful, lacerating academic satire that skewers everything about academic and writing life, most especially P.C. culture. For another Francine Prose writing book, this one not a novel, read Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People who Love Books. It’s a high-level, sophisticated exploration of the way a writer reads, and, unbelievably, it found its way onto the New York Times Bestseller list. Or perhaps not so unbelievably: a recent USA Today poll revealed that 82 percent of Americans either have written or would like to write a book.
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald’s novel, which is set in late-eighteenth-century Germany, is based on the life of a young philosophy student who will eventually become famous as the Romantic poet Novalis. It’s about a brilliant young man who falls in love with a dolt of a twelve-year-old girl, to the horror of his friends and family. To my mind, it’s a near-perfect book, and though it was clearly assiduously researched, Fitzgerald wears her knowledge lightly. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1997 over finalists Underworld by Don Delillo, Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andre Makine, Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, and American Pastoral by Philip Roth. There were a few grumblings at the time (Underworld had been the favorite in some circles), revived more recently when someone (one of the judges? I can’t remember exactly) suggested that The Blue Flower had been a compromise choice and that a smaller, less ambitious novel had won out over a book that swung for the fences. No disrespect meant to Delillo or any of the others, but The Blue Flower, though it comes in at just over 200 pages, is neither small nor unambitious. Would people have said the same thing if the writer had been a man?
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Nobel Prize for Literature winners (1901-2010)
2010- Mario Vargas Llosa
2009 - Herta Müller
* 2008 - Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
* 2005 - Harold Pinter
* 2004 - Elfriede Jelinek
* 2003 - J. M. Coetzee
* 2002 - Imre Kertész
* 2001 - V. S. Naipaul
* 2000 - Gao Xingjian
* 1996 - Wislawa Szymborska
* 1995 - Seamus Heaney
* 1994 - Kenzaburo Oe
* 1993 - Toni Morrison
* 1992 - Derek Walcott
* 1991 - Nadine Gordimer
* 1990 - Octavio Paz
* 1989 - Camilo José Cela
* 1988 - Naguib Mahfouz
* 1987 - Joseph Brodsky
* 1986 - Wole Soyinka
* 1985 - Claude Simon
* 1984 - Jaroslav Seifert
* 1983 - William Golding
* 1982 - Gabriel García Márquez
* 1981 - Elias Canetti
* 1980 - Czeslaw Milosz
* 1979 - Odysseus Elytis
* 1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
* 1977 - Vicente Aleixandre
* 1976 - Saul Bellow
* 1975 - Eugenio Montale
* 1974 - Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson
* 1973 - Patrick White
* 1972 - Heinrich Böll
* 1971 - Pablo Neruda
* 1970 - Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
* 1969 - Samuel Beckett
* 1968 - Yasunari Kawabata
* 1967 - Miguel Angel Asturias
* 1966 - Shmuel Agnon, Nelly Sachs
* 1965 - Mikhail Sholokhov
* 1964 - Jean-Paul Sartre
* 1963 - Giorgos Seferis
* 1962 - John Steinbeck
* 1961 - Ivo Andric
* 1960 - Saint-John Perse
* 1959 - Salvatore Quasimodo
* 1958 - Boris Pasternak
* 1957 - Albert Camus
* 1956 - Juan Ramón Jiménez
* 1955 - Halldór Laxness
* 1954 - Ernest Hemingway
* 1953 - Winston Churchill
* 1952 - François Mauriac
* 1951 - Pär Lagerkvist
* 1950 - Bertrand Russell
* 1949 - William Faulkner
* 1948 - T.S. Eliot
* 1947 - André Gide
* 1946 - Hermann Hesse
* 1945 - Gabriela Mistral
* 1944 - Johannes V. Jensen
* 1943 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
* 1942 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
* 1941 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
* 1940 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
* 1939 - Frans Eemil Sillanpää
* 1938 - Pearl Buck
* 1937 - Roger Martin du Gard
* 1936 - Eugene O'Neill
* 1935 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
* 1934 - Luigi Pirandello
* 1933 - Ivan Bunin
* 1932 - John Galsworthy
* 1931 - Erik Axel Karlfeldt
* 1930 - Sinclair Lewis
* 1929 - Thomas Mann
* 1928 - Sigrid Undset
* 1927 - Henri Bergson
* 1926 - Grazia Deledda
* 1925 - George Bernard Shaw
* 1924 - Wladyslaw Reymont
* 1923 - William Butler Yeats
* 1922 - Jacinto Benavente
* 1921 - Anatole France
* 1920 - Knut Hamsun
* 1919 - Carl Spitteler
* 1918 - The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
* 1917 - Karl Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan
* 1916 - Verner von Heidenstam
* 1915 - Romain Rolland
* 1914 - The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
* 1913 - Rabindranath Tagore
* 1912 - Gerhart Hauptmann
* 1911 - Maurice Maeterlinck
* 1910 - Paul Heyse
* 1909 - Selma Lagerlöf
* 1908 - Rudolf Eucken
* 1907 - Rudyard Kipling
* 1906 - Giosuè Carducci
* 1905 - Henryk Sienkiewicz
* 1904 - Frédéric Mistral, José Echegaray
* 1903 - Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
* 1902 - Theodor Mommsen
* 1901 - Sully Prudhomme
2009 - Herta Müller
* 2008 - Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
* 2007 - Doris Lessing
* 2006 - Orhan Pamuk* 2005 - Harold Pinter
* 2004 - Elfriede Jelinek
* 2003 - J. M. Coetzee
* 2002 - Imre Kertész
* 2001 - V. S. Naipaul
* 2000 - Gao Xingjian
* 1999 - Günter Grass
* 1998 - José Saramago
* 1997 - Dario Fo* 1996 - Wislawa Szymborska
* 1995 - Seamus Heaney
* 1994 - Kenzaburo Oe
* 1993 - Toni Morrison
* 1992 - Derek Walcott
* 1991 - Nadine Gordimer
* 1990 - Octavio Paz
* 1989 - Camilo José Cela
* 1988 - Naguib Mahfouz
* 1987 - Joseph Brodsky
* 1986 - Wole Soyinka
* 1985 - Claude Simon
* 1984 - Jaroslav Seifert
* 1983 - William Golding
* 1982 - Gabriel García Márquez
* 1981 - Elias Canetti
* 1980 - Czeslaw Milosz
* 1979 - Odysseus Elytis
* 1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
* 1977 - Vicente Aleixandre
* 1976 - Saul Bellow
* 1975 - Eugenio Montale
* 1974 - Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson
* 1973 - Patrick White
* 1972 - Heinrich Böll
* 1971 - Pablo Neruda
* 1970 - Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
* 1969 - Samuel Beckett
* 1968 - Yasunari Kawabata
* 1967 - Miguel Angel Asturias
* 1966 - Shmuel Agnon, Nelly Sachs
* 1965 - Mikhail Sholokhov
* 1964 - Jean-Paul Sartre
* 1963 - Giorgos Seferis
* 1962 - John Steinbeck
* 1961 - Ivo Andric
* 1960 - Saint-John Perse
* 1959 - Salvatore Quasimodo
* 1958 - Boris Pasternak
* 1957 - Albert Camus
* 1956 - Juan Ramón Jiménez
* 1955 - Halldór Laxness
* 1954 - Ernest Hemingway
* 1953 - Winston Churchill
* 1952 - François Mauriac
* 1951 - Pär Lagerkvist
* 1950 - Bertrand Russell
* 1949 - William Faulkner
* 1948 - T.S. Eliot
* 1947 - André Gide
* 1946 - Hermann Hesse
* 1945 - Gabriela Mistral
* 1944 - Johannes V. Jensen
* 1943 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
* 1942 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
* 1941 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
* 1940 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
* 1939 - Frans Eemil Sillanpää
* 1938 - Pearl Buck
* 1937 - Roger Martin du Gard
* 1936 - Eugene O'Neill
* 1935 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
* 1934 - Luigi Pirandello
* 1933 - Ivan Bunin
* 1932 - John Galsworthy
* 1931 - Erik Axel Karlfeldt
* 1930 - Sinclair Lewis
* 1929 - Thomas Mann
* 1928 - Sigrid Undset
* 1927 - Henri Bergson
* 1926 - Grazia Deledda
* 1925 - George Bernard Shaw
* 1924 - Wladyslaw Reymont
* 1923 - William Butler Yeats
* 1922 - Jacinto Benavente
* 1921 - Anatole France
* 1920 - Knut Hamsun
* 1919 - Carl Spitteler
* 1918 - The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
* 1917 - Karl Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan
* 1916 - Verner von Heidenstam
* 1915 - Romain Rolland
* 1914 - The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
* 1913 - Rabindranath Tagore
* 1912 - Gerhart Hauptmann
* 1911 - Maurice Maeterlinck
* 1910 - Paul Heyse
* 1909 - Selma Lagerlöf
* 1908 - Rudolf Eucken
* 1907 - Rudyard Kipling
* 1906 - Giosuè Carducci
* 1905 - Henryk Sienkiewicz
* 1904 - Frédéric Mistral, José Echegaray
* 1903 - Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
* 1902 - Theodor Mommsen
* 1901 - Sully Prudhomme
Friday, August 13, 2010
American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation (1980-2008)
From American Booksellers Association and Before Columbus Foundation Awards accessed 8/13/10
2010 Awards
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music by Amiri Baraka
and 10 more -- where are they listed?
2009 Awards
The American Book Award was established in 1978 by the Before Columbus Foundation. It seeks to recognize outstanding literary achievement by contemporary American authors, without restriction to race, sex, ethnic background, or genre. This should not be confused with the National Book Awards which operated under the same nomenclature, American Book Award, between 1980 and 1986 when both organizations gave out different awards under the same name.
2009
Houston A. Baker, Jr., Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Right Era
Danit Brown, Ask for a Convertible
Jericho Brown, Please (New Issues Poetry & Prose)
José Antonio Burciaga, The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes: Selected Works of José Antonio Burciaga, edited by Mimi R. Gladstein and Daniel Chacón (University of Arizona Press)
Claire Hope Cummings, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds
Stella Pope Duarte, If I Die in Juarez (The University of Arizona Press)
Linda Gregg, All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press)
Suheir Hammad, Breaking Poems (Cypher Books)
Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder (Pantheon Books)
George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself: The A.A.C.M. and American Experimental Music
Patricia Santana, Ghosts of El Grullo (University of New Mexico Press)
Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer
Lifetime Achievement Award: Miguel Algarin
Winners of the American Book Award
* 1980 – Douglas Woolf for Future preconditional: A collection
* 1980 – Edward Dorn for Hello, La Jolla
* 1980 – Jayne Cortez for Mouth on Paper
* 1980 – Leslie Marmon Silko for Ceremony
* 1980 – Mei-mei Berssenbrugge for Random Possession
* 1980 – Milton Murayama for All I Asking for Is My Body
* 1980 – Quincy Troupe for Snake Back Solos
* 1980 – Rudolfo Anaya for Tortuga: A Novel
* 1981 – Alta for Shameless Hussy
* 1981 – Alan Chong Lau for Songs for Jadina
* 1981 – Bienvenido N. Santos for Scent of Apples: A Collection of Stories
* 1981 – Helen Adam for Turn Again to Me & Other Poems
* 1981 – Lionel Mitchell for Traveling Light
* 1981 – Miguel Algarín for On Call
* 1981 – Nicholasa Mohr for Felita
* 1981 – Peter Blue Cloud for Back Then Tomorrow
* 1981 – Robert Kelly for The Time of Voice: Poems 1994-1996
* 1981 – Rose Drachler for The Choice
* 1981 – Susan Howe for The Liberties
* 1981 – Toni Cade Bambara for The Salt Eaters
* 1982 – Al Young for Bodies and Soul
* 1982 – Duane Niatum for Songs for the Harvester of Dreams: Poems
* 1982 – E. L. Mayo for Collected Poems E L Mayo
* 1982 – Frank Chin for Chickencoop Chinaman and the Year of the Dragon
* 1982 – Hilton Obenzinger for This Passover or the next, I will never be in Jerusalem
* 1982 – Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, Judy Yung for Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940
* 1982 – Jerome Rothenberg for Pre-Faces and Other Writings
* 1982 – Joyce Carol Thomas for Marked by Fire
* 1982 – Leroy Quintana for Paper Dance: 55 Latino Poets
* 1982 – Lorna Dee Cervantes for Emplumada
* 1982 – Ronald Phillip Tanaka for The Shino Suite: Japanese-American Poetry
* 1982 – Russell Banks for Book of Jamaica
* 1982 – Tato Laviera for Enclave
* 1983 – Barbara Christian for Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976
* 1983 – Cecilia Liang for Chinese Folk Poetry
* 1983 – Evangelina Vigil for Thirty: An Seen a Lot
* 1983 – Harriet Rohmer for Legend of Food Mountain: LA Montana Del Alimento
* 1983 – James D. Houston for Californians: Searching for the Golden State
* 1983 – Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn for Pet food & tropical apparitions
* 1983 – John A. Williams for Click Song: A Novel
* 1983 – Joy Kogawa for Obasan
* 1983 – Judy Grahn for The Queen of Wands: Poetry
* 1983 – Nash Candelaria for Not by the Sword
* 1983 – Peter Guralnick for Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians
* 1983 – Sean O Tuama for An Duanaire Sixteen Hundred to Nineteen Hundred: Poems of the Dispossessed
* 1984 – Cecil Brown for Days Without Weather
* 1984 – Gary Snyder for Axe Handles: Poems
* 1984 – Howard Schwartz, Mark Podwal for The Captive Soul of the Messiah: New Tales About Reb Nachman
* 1984 – Imamu Amiri Baraka for Anthology of African American Women: Confirmation Men
* 1984 – Jesús Colón for A Puerto Rican in New York, and Other Sketches
* 1984 – Joseph Bruchac for Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian-American Poets
* 1984 – Maurice Kenny for The Mama Poems
* 1984 – Mei-mei Berssenbrugge for The heat bird
* 1984 – Miné Okubo for Citizen 13660
* 1984 – Paule Marshall for Praisesong for the Widow
* 1984 – Ruthanne Lum McCunn, You-shan Tang, Ellen Lai-shan Yeung for Pie-Biter
* 1984 – Thomas McGrath for Echoes inside the labyrinth
* 1984 – Venkatesh Kulkarni for Naked in Deccan
* 1984 – William J. Kennedy for O Albany!
* 1985 – Angela Jackson for Solo in the Box Car Third Floor E
* 1985 – Arnold Genthe, John Kuo Wei Tchen for Genthe's Photographs of San Francisco's Old Chinatown
* 1985 – Colleen J. McElroy for Queen of the Ebony Isles
* 1985 – Gary Soto for Living Up The Street
* 1985 – Peter Irons for Justice at War
* 1985 – Keiho Soga, Taisanboku Mori, Sojin Takei, Muin Pzaki for Poets Behind Barbed Wire
* 1985 – Louise Erdrich for Love Medicine: A Novel
* 1985 – Maureen Owen for Amelia Earhart
* 1985 – May Sarton for At Seventy: A Journal
* 1985 – Robert Edward Duncan for Ground Work: Before the War
* 1985 – Ron Jones for Say Ray
* 1985 – Sandra Cisneros for The House on Mango Street
* 1985 – Sonia Sanchez for Homegirls and Handgrenades
* 1985 – William Oandasan for Round Valley Songs
* 1986 – Anna Lee Walters for The Sun Is Not Merciful: Short Stories
* 1986 – Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua for This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
* 1986 – Helen Barolini for The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writing by Italian American Women
* 1986 – Jeff Hannusch for I Hear You Knockin : The Sound of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues
* 1986 – Linda Hogan for Seeing Through the Sun
* 1986 – Miguel Algarin for Time's Now/Ya Es Tiempo
* 1986 – Natasha Borovsky for A Daughter of the Nobility
* 1986 – Raymond Federman for Smiles on Washington Square: A Love Story of Sorts
* 1986 – Susan Howe for My Emily Dickinson
* 1986 – Terence Winch for Irish Musicians/American Friends
* 1986 – Toshio Mori for Yokohama, California
* 1987 – Ai for SIN
* 1987 – Ana Castillo for The Mixquiahuala Letters
* 1987 – Cyn Zarco for Circumnavigations
* 1987 – Daniel McGuire for Portrait of Little Boy in darkness
* 1987 – Dorothy Bryant for Confessions of Madame Psyche: Memoirs and Letters of Mei-Li Murrow
* 1987 – Etheridge Knight for The Essential Etheridge Knight
* 1987 – Gary Giddins for Celebrating Bird: The Triumph Of Charlie Parker
* 1987 – Harvey Pekar for The New American Splendor Anthology: From Off the Streets of Cleveland
* 1987 – James Welch for Fools Crow
* 1987 – John Wieners for Selected Poems: 1958-1984
* 1987 – Juan Felipe Herrera for Face Games
* 1987 – Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum for liberazione della donna: feminism in Italy
* 1987 – Michael Mayo for Practicing Angels: A Contemporary Anthology of San Francisco Bay Area Poetry
* 1987 – Septima Poinsette Clark, Cynthia Stokes Brown for Ready from Within: A First Person Narrative
* 1987 – Terry McMillan for Mama
* 1988 – Allison Blakely for Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought
* 1988 – Charles Olson for The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding the Maximus Poems
* 1988 – Daisy Bates for The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir
* 1988 – David Halberstam for The Reckoning
* 1988 – Edward Sanders for Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century: Poems 1961-1985
* 1988 – Gerald Vizenor for Griever: An American Monkey King in China
* 1988 – Jimmy Santiago Baca for Martin & Meditations on the South Valley
* 1988 – Kesho Y. Scott, Cherry Muhanji, Egyirba High for Tight Spaces
* 1988 – Marlon K. Hom for Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown
* 1988 – Opal Whiteley for The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow: The Mystical Nature Diary of Opal Whiteley
* 1988 – Ronald Sukenick for Down and in: Life in the Underground
* 1988 – Salvatore LA Puma for The Boys of Bensonhurst
* 1988 – Toni Morrison for Beloved
* 1988 – Wing Tek Lum, Tek Lum Lum for Expounding the Doubtful Points
* 1989 – Alma Luz Villanueva for The Ultraviolet Sky
* 1989 – Askia M. Toure for From the Pyramids to the Projects: Poems of Genocide and Resistance!
* 1989 – Audre Lorde for A Burst of Light
* 1989 – Carolyn Lau for Wode Shuofa: My Way of Speaking
* 1989 – Emory Elliott for Columbia Literary History of the United States
* 1989 – Eduardo Galeano for Genesis
* 1989 – Frank Chin for The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co.
* 1989 – Henry Louis Gates for The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism
* 1989 – Isabel Allende for Eva Luna
* 1989 – J. California Cooper for Homemade Love
* 1989 – Jennifer Stone for Stone's Throw
* 1989 – Josephine Gattuso Hendin for The Right Thing to Do
* 1989 – Leslie Scalapino for way
* 1989 – Shuntaro Tanikawa for Floating the River in Melancholy
* 1989 – Charles Fanning for The Exiles of Erin: Nineteenth-Century Irish-American Fiction
* 1989 – William Minoru Hohri for Repairing America: An Account of the Movement for Japanese American Redress
* 1990 – Adrienne Kennedy for People Who Led to My Plays
* 1990 – Barbara Grizzuti Harrison for Italian Days
* 1990 – Elizabeth Woody for Hand into Stone: Poems
* 1990 – Hualing Nieh for Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China
* 1990 – Itabari Njeri for Every Good-Bye Ain't Gone
* 1990 – James M. Freeman for Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese-American Lives
* 1990 – John C. Walter, J. Raymond Jones for The Harlem Fox: J. Raymond Jones and Tammany, 1920-1970
* 1990 – John Norton for Light at the End of the Bog
* 1990 – Jose Emilio Gonzalez for Vivar a Hostos
* 1990 – Sergei Kan for Symbolic Immortality: The Tlingit Potlatch of the Nineteenth Century
* 1990 – Lloyd A. Thompson for Romans and Blacks
* 1990 – Martin Bernal for Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization
* 1990 – Michelle T. Clinton, Sesshu Foster for Invocation L.A.: Urban Multicultural Poetry
* 1990 – Miles Davis for Miles
* 1990 – Paula Gunn Allen for Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women
* 1990 – Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Mayumi Tsutakawa, Margarita Donnelly for The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology
* 1990 – Daniela Gioseffi for Women on War (Essential Voices for the Nuclear Age)
* 1991 – Alejandro Murguía for Southern Front
* 1991 – Bell Hooks for Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics
* 1991 – Bruce Wright for Black Robes, White Justice: Why Our Legal System Doesn't Work for Blacks
* 1991 – Charley Trujillo for Soldados: Chicanos in Viet Nam
* 1991 – D. H. Melhem for Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Introductions & Interviews
* 1991 – Deborah Keenan for Looking for Home: Women Writing About Exile
* 1991 – Jessica Hagedorn for Dogeaters
* 1991 – John Edgar Wideman for Philadelphia Fire: A Novel
* 1991 – Joy Harjo for In Mad Love and War
* 1991 – Karen Tei Yamashita for Through the Arc of the Rain Forest
* 1991 – Lucia Berlin for Homesick: New and Selected Stories
* 1991 – Mary Crow Dog for Lakota Woman
* 1991 – Meridel Le Sueur for Harvest Song: Collected Essays and Stories
* 1991 – Mill Hunk Herald Collective for Overtime: Punchin' Out With the Mill Hunk Herald Magazine
* 1991 – Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Richard Dauenhauer for Haa Tuwunaagu Yis, for Healing Our Spirit: Tlingit Oratory
* 1991 – R. Baxter Miller for The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes
* 1991 – Thomas Centolella for Terra Firma
* 1992 – A'Lelia Perry Bundles for Madam C.J. Walker
* 1992 – Art Spiegelman for The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale
* 1992 – Benjamin Alire Saenz for Calendar of Dust
* 1992 – Donna J. Haraway for Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
* 1992 – Fritjof Capra for Belonging to the universe: Explorations on the frontiers of science and spirituality
* 1992 – Jose Antonio Burciaga for Undocumented Love/Amor Indocumentado: A Personal Anthology of Poetry
* 1992 – Keith Gilyard for Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence
* 1992 – Lucy Thompson for To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman
* 1992 – Norma Field for In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century's End
* 1992 – Peter Bacho for Cebu
* 1992 – Peter Kalifornsky for Dena'ina Legacy: K'tl'egh'i Sukdu: The Collected Writings of Peter Kalifornsky
* 1992 – Raymond Andrews for Jessie and Jesus and Cousin Claire
* 1992 – Sandra Scofield for Beyond Deserving
* 1992 – Sheila Hamanaka for Journey
* 1992 – Stephen R. Fox for The Unknown Internment: An Oral History of the Relocation of Italian Americans During World War II
* 1992 – Steven R. Carter for Hansberry's Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity,
* 1992 – Verlyn Klinkenborg for The Last Fine Time
* 1992 – William B. Branch, Amiri Baraka, August Wilson for Black Thunder: An Anthology of African-American Drama
* 1993 – Asake Bomani, Belvie Rooks for Paris Connections: African American Artists in Paris
* 1993 – Christopher Mogil, Peter Woodrow for We Gave Away a Fortune
* 1993 – Cornel West for Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times
* 1993 – Denise Giardina for Unquiet Earth
* 1993 – Diane Glancy for Claiming Breath
* 1993 – Eugene B. Redmond for The Eye in the Ceiling
* 1993 – Francisco X. Alarcon for Snake Poems
* 1993 – Gerald Graff for Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education
* 1993 – Jack Beatty for The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley
* 1993 – Leroy V. Quintana for The History of Home
* 1993 – Katherine Peter for Neets'aii Gwiindaii: Living in the Chandalar Country
* 1993 – Nelson George for Elevating the Game: Black Men and Basketball
* 1993 – Ninotchka Rosca for Twice Blessed: A Novel
* 1994 – Giose Rimanelli for Benedetta in Guysterland
* 1994 – Eric Drooker for Flood!: A Novel in Pictures
* 1994 – Graciela Limon for In Search of Bernabe
* 1994 – Gregory J. Reed for Economic Empowerment Through the Church
* 1994 – Janet Campbell Hale for Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter
* 1994 – Jill Nelson for Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience
* 1994 – Lawson Fusao Inada for Legends from Camp
* 1994 – Nicole Blackman for Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe
* 1994 – Paul Gilroy for The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness
* 1994 – Ronald Takaki for A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
* 1994 – Rose L. Glickman for Daughters of Feminists
* 1994 – Tino Villanueva for Scene from the Movie GIANT
* 1994 – Virginia L. Kroll for Wood-Hoopoe Willie
* 1995 – Abraham Rodriguez for Spidertown: A Novel
* 1995 – Herb Boyd, Robert L. Allen for Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America--An Anthology
* 1995 – Denise Chavez for Face of an Angel
* 1995 – John Egerton for Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South
* 1995 – John Ross for Rebellion from the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas
* 1995 – Thomas Avena for Life Sentences: Writers, Artists, and AIDS
* 1995 – Linda Raymond for Rocking the Babies: A Novel
* 1995 – Li-Young Lee for The Winged Seed: A Remembrance
* 1995 – Marianna De Marco Torgovnick for Crossing Ocean Parkway
* 1995 – Marnie Mueller for Green Fires: Assault on Eden: A Novel of the Ecuadorian Rainforest
* 1995 – Peter Quinn for Banished Children of Eve, A Novel of Civil War New York
* 1995 – Sandra Martz for I Am Becoming the Woman I've Wanted
* 1995 – Gordon Henry Jr. for The Light People
* 1995 – Tricia Rose for Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America
* 1996 – Agate Nesaule for A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile
* 1996 – Arthur Sze for Archipelago
* 1996 – Chang-Rae Lee for Native Speaker
* 1996 – Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni for Arranged Marriage
* 1996 – E.J. Miller Laino for Girl Hurt
* 1996 – Glenn C. Loury for One by One from the Inside Out: Race and Responsibility in America
* 1996 – James W. Loewen for Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
* 1996 – Joe Sacco, Edward Said for Palestine
* 1996 – Kimiko Hahn for Unbearable Heart, The
* 1996 – Maria Espinosa for Longing
* 1996 – Robert Viscusi for Astoria
* 1996 – Sherman Alexie for Reservation Blues
* 1996 – Ron Sakolsky, Fred Weihan Ho for Sounding Off!: Music as Resistance / Rebellion / Revolution
* 1996 – Stephanie Cowell for The Physician of London: The Second Part of the Seventeenth-Century Trilogy of Nicholas Cooke
* 1996 – William H. Gass for The Tunnel
* 1997 – Alurista for Et Tu ... Raza
* 1997 – Derrick Bell for Gospel Choirs: Psalms Of Survival In An Alien Land Called Home
* 1997 – Dorothy Barresi for The Post-Rapture Diner
* 1997 – Guillermo Gomez-Pena for The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century
* 1997 – Louis Owens for Nightland
* 1997 – Martin Espada for Imagine the Angels of Bread: Poems
* 1997 – Montserrat Fontes for Dreams of the Centaur: A Novel
* 1997 – Noel Ignatiev for Race Traitor
* 1997 – Shirley Geok-lin Lim for Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands
* 1997 – Sunaina Maira for Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America
* 1997 – Thulani Davis for Maker of Saints
* 1997 – Tom De Haven for Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies: A Novel
* 1997 – William M. Banks for Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life
* 1997 – Brenda Knight for Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution
* 1998 – Allison Adelle Hedge Coke for Dog Road Woman
* 1998 – Angela Y. Davis for Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday
* 1998 – Brenda Marie Osbey for All Saints: New and Selected Poems
* 1998 – Don DeLillo for Underworld
* 1998 – Jim Barnes for On Native Ground: Memoirs and Impressions
* 1998 – John A. Williams for Safari West: Poems
* 1998 – Nancy Rawles for Love Like Gumbo
* 1998 – Nora Okja Keller for Comfort Woman
* 1998 – Sandra Benitez for Bitter Grounds: A Novel
* 1998 – Scott DeVeaux for The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History
* 1998 – Thomas Lynch for The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade
* 1999 – Alice McDermott for Charming Billy
* 1999 – Anna Linzer for Ghost Dancing
* 1999 – Brian Ward for Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations
* 1999 – Chiori Santiago for Home to Medicine Mountain
* 1999 – E. Donald Two-Rivers for Survivor's Medicine: Short Stories
* 1999 – Edwidge Danticat for The Farming of Bones
* 1999 – Judith Roche, Meg McHutchison for First Fish, First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim
* 1999 – Gioia Timpanelli for Sometimes the Soul: Two Novellas of Sicily
* 1999 – Gloria Naylor for The Men of Brewster Place: A Novel
* 1999 – James D. Houston for The Last Paradise
* 1999 – Jerry Lipka, Gerald V. Mohatt, Ciulistet Group for Transforming the Culture of Schools: Yup¡k Eskimo Examples
* 1999 – Trey Ellis for Right Here, Right Now
* 1999 – Josip Novakovich for Salvation and Other Disasters
* 1999 – Lauro Flores for The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-Five Years of U.S. Hispanic Literature
* 1999 – Luís Alberto Urrea for Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life
* 1999 – Nelson George for Hip Hop America: Hip Hop and the Molding of Black Generation X
* 1999 – Speer Morgan for The Freshour Cylinders
* 1999 – Gary Gach for What Book!?: Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop
* 2000 – Allan J. Ryan for The Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony in Contemporary Native Art
* 2000 – Andrés Montoya for The Ice Wosrkers Sings and Other Poem
* 2000 – Camille Peri, Kate Moses for Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood
* 2000 – David A. J. Richards for Italian American: The Racializing of an Ethnic Identity
* 2000 – David Toop for Exotica
* 2000 – Elva Trevino Hart for Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child
* 2000 – Emil Guillermo for Amok: Essays from an Asian American Perspective; With an Introduction by Ishmael Reed
* 2000 – Frank Chin for The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co.
* 2000 – Helen Thomas for Front Row at the White House : My Life and Times
* 2000 – Janisse Ray for Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
* 2000 – John Russell Rickford, Russell John Rickford for Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English
* 2000 – Leroy TeCube for Year in Nam: A Native American Soldier's Story
* 2000 – Lois-Ann Yamanaka for Heads By Harry
* 2000 – Michael Lally for It's Not Nostalgia: Poetry & Prose
* 2000 – Michael Patrick MacDonald for All Souls: A Family Story from Southie
* 2000 – Rahna Reiko Rizzuto for Why She Left Us: A Novel
* 2000 – Robert Creeley for The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2005
* 2001 – Amanda J. Cobb for Listening to Our Grandmothers' Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females, 1852-1949
* 2001 – Andrea Dworkin for Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation
* 2001 – Carolyne Wright for Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire
* 2001 – Chalmers Johnson for Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
* 2001 – Cheri Register for Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir
* 2001 – Chris Ware for Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth
* 2001 – Diana Garcia for When Living Was a Labor Camp
* 2001 – Elizabeth Nunez for Bruised Hibiscus
* 2001 – Janet McAdams for Island of Lost Luggage
* 2001 – Philip Whalen for Overtime: Selected Poems
* 2001 – Russell C. Leong for Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories
* 2001 – Sandra M. Gilbert for Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems, 1969-1999
* 2001 – Ted Joans for Teducation
* 2001 – Tillie Olsen for Silences
* 2001 – William S. Penn for Killing Time With Strangers
* 2002 – Aaron Abeyta for Colcha
* 2002 – Al Young for The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems, 1990-2000
* 2002 – Alex Kuo for Lipstick and Other Stories
* 2002 – Dana Gioia for Interrogations at Noon
* 2002 – Donald Phelps for Reading the Funnies : Looking at Great Cartoonists Throughout the First Half of the 20th Century
* 2002 – Gloria Frym for Homeless at Home
* 2002 – Jack Hirschman for Front Lines
* 2002 – Jessel Miller for Angels in the Vineyards
* 2002 – LeAnne Howe for Shell Shaker
* 2002 – Lerone Bennett for Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream
* 2002 – Michael N. Nagler for Is There No Other Way? The Search for a Nonviolent Future
* 2002 – Rilla Askew for Fire in Beulah
* 2002 – Susanne Antonetta for Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir
* 2002 – Tananarive Due for The Living Blood
* 2003 – Alejandro Murguía for This War Called Love
* 2003 – Daniel Ellsberg for Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
* 2003 – Debra Magpie Earling for Perma Red
* 2003 – Eric Porter for What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists
* 2003 – Igor Krupnik for Akuzilleput Igaqullghet Our Words Put to Paper Sourcebook in St. Lawrence Island Yupik Heritage and History
* 2003 – Jack Newfield for The Full Rudy: The Man, the Myth, the Mania
* 2003 – Jewell Parker Rhodes for Douglass' Women : A Novel
* 2003 – Joseph Papaleo for Italian Stories
* 2003 – Kevin Baker for Paradise Alley
* 2003 – Rachel Simon for Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey
* 2003 – Rick Heide for Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California
* 2003 – Velma Wallis for Raising Ourselves: A Gwich'in Coming of Age Story from the Yukon River
* 2004 – A. Robert Lee for Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions
* 2004 – Charisse Jones, Kumea Shorter-Gooden for Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America
* 2004 – David Cole for Enemy Aliens: Double Standards And Constitutional Freedoms In The War On Terrorism
* 2004 – Diana Abu-Jaber for Crescent: A Novel
* 2004 – Diane Sher Lutovich for What I Stole
* 2004 – Kristin Hunter Lattany for Breaking Away
* 2004 – Michael Walsh for And All the Saints
* 2004 – Renato Rosaldo for Prayer to Spider Woman / Rezo a la Mujer Araa
* 2004 – Ruth L. Ozeki for All Over Creation
* 2004 – Scott Saul for Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties
* 2005 – Alisha S. Drabek for The Red Cedar of Afognak, A Driftwood Journey
* 2005 – Bernard W. Bell for The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots And Modern Literary Branches
* 2005 – Don Lee for Country of Origin: A Novel
* 2005 – Don West, Jeff Biggers, George Brosi for No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems
* 2005 – Hiroshi Kashiwagi for Swimming in the American: A Memoir And Selected Writings
* 2005 – Jeff Chang, D.J. Kool Herc for Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
* 2005 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy
* 2005 – Julie Chibbaro for Redemption
* 2005 – Lamont B. Steptoe for A Long Movie of Shadows
* 2005 – Ralph M. Flores for The Horse in the Kitchen: Stories of a Mexican-American Family
* 2005 – Richard A. Clarke for Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror
* 2005 – Cecelie Berry for Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on Motherhood
* 2006 – Carlton T. Spiller for Scalding Heart
* 2006 – Darryl Dickson-Carr for The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction
* 2006 – David P. Diaz for The White Tortilla: Reflections of a Second -Generation Mexican - American
* 2006 – Doris Seale for A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children
* 2006 – Jay Wright for Transfigurations: Collected Poems
* 2006 – Josh Kun for Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America
* 2006 – Kevin J. Mullen for The Toughest Gang in Town: Police Stories from Old San Francisco
* 2006 – Mackenzie Bezos for The Testing of Luther Albright: A Novel
* 2006 – Matt Briggs for Shoot the Buffalo
* 2006 – Matthew Shenoda for Somewhere Else
* 2006 – P. Lewis for Nate
* 2006 – Peter Metcalfe for Gumboot Determination: The Story of the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium
* 2006 – Thomas Ferraro for Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America
* 2006 – Tim Z. Hernandez for Skin Tax
* 2007 – Daniel Cassidy for How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads
* 2007 – Ernestine Hayes for Blonde Indian: An Alaska Native Memoir
* 2007 – Gary Panter for Jimbo's Inferno
* 2007 – Jeffrey F. L. Partridge for Beyond Literary Chinatown
* 2007 – Judith Roche for Wisdom of the Body
* 2007 – Kali Vanbaale for The Space Between
* 2007 – Michael Eric Dyson for Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster
* 2007 – Patricia Klindienst for The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic America
* 2007 – Reyna Grande for Across a Hundred Mountains: A Novel
* 2007 – Rigoberto Gonzalez for Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa
* 2008 – Moustafa Bayoumi for How Does It Feel to Be a Problem Being Young and Arab in America
* 2008 – Douglas A. Blackmon for Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
* 2008 – Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Richard Dauenhauer, and Lydia T. Black, and Anóoshi Lingít Aaní Ká for Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 And 1804
* 2008 – Maria Mazziotti Gillan for All That Lies Between Us
* 2008 – Nikki Giovanni for The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998
* 2008 – C.S. Giscombe for Prairie Style
* 2008 – Angela Jackson for Where I Must Go: A Novel
* 2008 – L. Luis Lopez for Each Month I Sing
* 2008 – Tom Lutz for Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America
* 2008 – Fae Myenne Ng for Steer Toward Rock
* 2008 – Yuko Taniguchi for The Ocean in the Closet
* 2008 – Lorenzo Thomas, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, editor for Don't Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition
* 2008 – Frank B. Wilderson III for Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid
* 2008 – Jonathan Curiel for Al’ America: Travels Through America’s Arab and Islamic Roots
* 2008 – J.J. Phillips, Author of Mojo Hand: An Orphic Tale(Lifetime Achievement Award)
2010 Awards
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music by Amiri Baraka
and 10 more -- where are they listed?
2009 Awards
The American Book Award was established in 1978 by the Before Columbus Foundation. It seeks to recognize outstanding literary achievement by contemporary American authors, without restriction to race, sex, ethnic background, or genre. This should not be confused with the National Book Awards which operated under the same nomenclature, American Book Award, between 1980 and 1986 when both organizations gave out different awards under the same name.
2009
Houston A. Baker, Jr., Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Right Era
Danit Brown, Ask for a Convertible
Jericho Brown, Please (New Issues Poetry & Prose)
José Antonio Burciaga, The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes: Selected Works of José Antonio Burciaga, edited by Mimi R. Gladstein and Daniel Chacón (University of Arizona Press)
Claire Hope Cummings, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds
Stella Pope Duarte, If I Die in Juarez (The University of Arizona Press)
Linda Gregg, All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press)
Suheir Hammad, Breaking Poems (Cypher Books)
Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder (Pantheon Books)
George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself: The A.A.C.M. and American Experimental Music
Patricia Santana, Ghosts of El Grullo (University of New Mexico Press)
Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer
Lifetime Achievement Award: Miguel Algarin
Winners of the American Book Award
* 1980 – Douglas Woolf for Future preconditional: A collection
* 1980 – Edward Dorn for Hello, La Jolla
* 1980 – Jayne Cortez for Mouth on Paper
* 1980 – Leslie Marmon Silko for Ceremony
* 1980 – Mei-mei Berssenbrugge for Random Possession
* 1980 – Milton Murayama for All I Asking for Is My Body
* 1980 – Quincy Troupe for Snake Back Solos
* 1980 – Rudolfo Anaya for Tortuga: A Novel
* 1981 – Alta for Shameless Hussy
* 1981 – Alan Chong Lau for Songs for Jadina
* 1981 – Bienvenido N. Santos for Scent of Apples: A Collection of Stories
* 1981 – Helen Adam for Turn Again to Me & Other Poems
* 1981 – Lionel Mitchell for Traveling Light
* 1981 – Miguel Algarín for On Call
* 1981 – Nicholasa Mohr for Felita
* 1981 – Peter Blue Cloud for Back Then Tomorrow
* 1981 – Robert Kelly for The Time of Voice: Poems 1994-1996
* 1981 – Rose Drachler for The Choice
* 1981 – Susan Howe for The Liberties
* 1981 – Toni Cade Bambara for The Salt Eaters
* 1982 – Al Young for Bodies and Soul
* 1982 – Duane Niatum for Songs for the Harvester of Dreams: Poems
* 1982 – E. L. Mayo for Collected Poems E L Mayo
* 1982 – Frank Chin for Chickencoop Chinaman and the Year of the Dragon
* 1982 – Hilton Obenzinger for This Passover or the next, I will never be in Jerusalem
* 1982 – Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, Judy Yung for Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940
* 1982 – Jerome Rothenberg for Pre-Faces and Other Writings
* 1982 – Joyce Carol Thomas for Marked by Fire
* 1982 – Leroy Quintana for Paper Dance: 55 Latino Poets
* 1982 – Lorna Dee Cervantes for Emplumada
* 1982 – Ronald Phillip Tanaka for The Shino Suite: Japanese-American Poetry
* 1982 – Russell Banks for Book of Jamaica
* 1982 – Tato Laviera for Enclave
* 1983 – Barbara Christian for Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976
* 1983 – Cecilia Liang for Chinese Folk Poetry
* 1983 – Evangelina Vigil for Thirty: An Seen a Lot
* 1983 – Harriet Rohmer for Legend of Food Mountain: LA Montana Del Alimento
* 1983 – James D. Houston for Californians: Searching for the Golden State
* 1983 – Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn for Pet food & tropical apparitions
* 1983 – John A. Williams for Click Song: A Novel
* 1983 – Joy Kogawa for Obasan
* 1983 – Judy Grahn for The Queen of Wands: Poetry
* 1983 – Nash Candelaria for Not by the Sword
* 1983 – Peter Guralnick for Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians
* 1983 – Sean O Tuama for An Duanaire Sixteen Hundred to Nineteen Hundred: Poems of the Dispossessed
* 1984 – Cecil Brown for Days Without Weather
* 1984 – Gary Snyder for Axe Handles: Poems
* 1984 – Howard Schwartz, Mark Podwal for The Captive Soul of the Messiah: New Tales About Reb Nachman
* 1984 – Imamu Amiri Baraka for Anthology of African American Women: Confirmation Men
* 1984 – Jesús Colón for A Puerto Rican in New York, and Other Sketches
* 1984 – Joseph Bruchac for Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian-American Poets
* 1984 – Maurice Kenny for The Mama Poems
* 1984 – Mei-mei Berssenbrugge for The heat bird
* 1984 – Miné Okubo for Citizen 13660
* 1984 – Paule Marshall for Praisesong for the Widow
* 1984 – Ruthanne Lum McCunn, You-shan Tang, Ellen Lai-shan Yeung for Pie-Biter
* 1984 – Thomas McGrath for Echoes inside the labyrinth
* 1984 – Venkatesh Kulkarni for Naked in Deccan
* 1984 – William J. Kennedy for O Albany!
* 1985 – Angela Jackson for Solo in the Box Car Third Floor E
* 1985 – Arnold Genthe, John Kuo Wei Tchen for Genthe's Photographs of San Francisco's Old Chinatown
* 1985 – Colleen J. McElroy for Queen of the Ebony Isles
* 1985 – Gary Soto for Living Up The Street
* 1985 – Peter Irons for Justice at War
* 1985 – Keiho Soga, Taisanboku Mori, Sojin Takei, Muin Pzaki for Poets Behind Barbed Wire
* 1985 – Louise Erdrich for Love Medicine: A Novel
* 1985 – Maureen Owen for Amelia Earhart
* 1985 – May Sarton for At Seventy: A Journal
* 1985 – Robert Edward Duncan for Ground Work: Before the War
* 1985 – Ron Jones for Say Ray
* 1985 – Sandra Cisneros for The House on Mango Street
* 1985 – Sonia Sanchez for Homegirls and Handgrenades
* 1985 – William Oandasan for Round Valley Songs
* 1986 – Anna Lee Walters for The Sun Is Not Merciful: Short Stories
* 1986 – Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua for This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
* 1986 – Helen Barolini for The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writing by Italian American Women
* 1986 – Jeff Hannusch for I Hear You Knockin : The Sound of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues
* 1986 – Linda Hogan for Seeing Through the Sun
* 1986 – Miguel Algarin for Time's Now/Ya Es Tiempo
* 1986 – Natasha Borovsky for A Daughter of the Nobility
* 1986 – Raymond Federman for Smiles on Washington Square: A Love Story of Sorts
* 1986 – Susan Howe for My Emily Dickinson
* 1986 – Terence Winch for Irish Musicians/American Friends
* 1986 – Toshio Mori for Yokohama, California
* 1987 – Ai for SIN
* 1987 – Ana Castillo for The Mixquiahuala Letters
* 1987 – Cyn Zarco for Circumnavigations
* 1987 – Daniel McGuire for Portrait of Little Boy in darkness
* 1987 – Dorothy Bryant for Confessions of Madame Psyche: Memoirs and Letters of Mei-Li Murrow
* 1987 – Etheridge Knight for The Essential Etheridge Knight
* 1987 – Gary Giddins for Celebrating Bird: The Triumph Of Charlie Parker
* 1987 – Harvey Pekar for The New American Splendor Anthology: From Off the Streets of Cleveland
* 1987 – James Welch for Fools Crow
* 1987 – John Wieners for Selected Poems: 1958-1984
* 1987 – Juan Felipe Herrera for Face Games
* 1987 – Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum for liberazione della donna: feminism in Italy
* 1987 – Michael Mayo for Practicing Angels: A Contemporary Anthology of San Francisco Bay Area Poetry
* 1987 – Septima Poinsette Clark, Cynthia Stokes Brown for Ready from Within: A First Person Narrative
* 1987 – Terry McMillan for Mama
* 1988 – Allison Blakely for Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought
* 1988 – Charles Olson for The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding the Maximus Poems
* 1988 – Daisy Bates for The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir
* 1988 – David Halberstam for The Reckoning
* 1988 – Edward Sanders for Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century: Poems 1961-1985
* 1988 – Gerald Vizenor for Griever: An American Monkey King in China
* 1988 – Jimmy Santiago Baca for Martin & Meditations on the South Valley
* 1988 – Kesho Y. Scott, Cherry Muhanji, Egyirba High for Tight Spaces
* 1988 – Marlon K. Hom for Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown
* 1988 – Opal Whiteley for The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow: The Mystical Nature Diary of Opal Whiteley
* 1988 – Ronald Sukenick for Down and in: Life in the Underground
* 1988 – Salvatore LA Puma for The Boys of Bensonhurst
* 1988 – Toni Morrison for Beloved
* 1988 – Wing Tek Lum, Tek Lum Lum for Expounding the Doubtful Points
* 1989 – Alma Luz Villanueva for The Ultraviolet Sky
* 1989 – Askia M. Toure for From the Pyramids to the Projects: Poems of Genocide and Resistance!
* 1989 – Audre Lorde for A Burst of Light
* 1989 – Carolyn Lau for Wode Shuofa: My Way of Speaking
* 1989 – Emory Elliott for Columbia Literary History of the United States
* 1989 – Eduardo Galeano for Genesis
* 1989 – Frank Chin for The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co.
* 1989 – Henry Louis Gates for The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism
* 1989 – Isabel Allende for Eva Luna
* 1989 – J. California Cooper for Homemade Love
* 1989 – Jennifer Stone for Stone's Throw
* 1989 – Josephine Gattuso Hendin for The Right Thing to Do
* 1989 – Leslie Scalapino for way
* 1989 – Shuntaro Tanikawa for Floating the River in Melancholy
* 1989 – Charles Fanning for The Exiles of Erin: Nineteenth-Century Irish-American Fiction
* 1989 – William Minoru Hohri for Repairing America: An Account of the Movement for Japanese American Redress
* 1990 – Adrienne Kennedy for People Who Led to My Plays
* 1990 – Barbara Grizzuti Harrison for Italian Days
* 1990 – Elizabeth Woody for Hand into Stone: Poems
* 1990 – Hualing Nieh for Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China
* 1990 – Itabari Njeri for Every Good-Bye Ain't Gone
* 1990 – James M. Freeman for Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese-American Lives
* 1990 – John C. Walter, J. Raymond Jones for The Harlem Fox: J. Raymond Jones and Tammany, 1920-1970
* 1990 – John Norton for Light at the End of the Bog
* 1990 – Jose Emilio Gonzalez for Vivar a Hostos
* 1990 – Sergei Kan for Symbolic Immortality: The Tlingit Potlatch of the Nineteenth Century
* 1990 – Lloyd A. Thompson for Romans and Blacks
* 1990 – Martin Bernal for Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization
* 1990 – Michelle T. Clinton, Sesshu Foster for Invocation L.A.: Urban Multicultural Poetry
* 1990 – Miles Davis for Miles
* 1990 – Paula Gunn Allen for Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women
* 1990 – Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Mayumi Tsutakawa, Margarita Donnelly for The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology
* 1990 – Daniela Gioseffi for Women on War (Essential Voices for the Nuclear Age)
* 1991 – Alejandro Murguía for Southern Front
* 1991 – Bell Hooks for Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics
* 1991 – Bruce Wright for Black Robes, White Justice: Why Our Legal System Doesn't Work for Blacks
* 1991 – Charley Trujillo for Soldados: Chicanos in Viet Nam
* 1991 – D. H. Melhem for Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Introductions & Interviews
* 1991 – Deborah Keenan for Looking for Home: Women Writing About Exile
* 1991 – Jessica Hagedorn for Dogeaters
* 1991 – John Edgar Wideman for Philadelphia Fire: A Novel
* 1991 – Joy Harjo for In Mad Love and War
* 1991 – Karen Tei Yamashita for Through the Arc of the Rain Forest
* 1991 – Lucia Berlin for Homesick: New and Selected Stories
* 1991 – Mary Crow Dog for Lakota Woman
* 1991 – Meridel Le Sueur for Harvest Song: Collected Essays and Stories
* 1991 – Mill Hunk Herald Collective for Overtime: Punchin' Out With the Mill Hunk Herald Magazine
* 1991 – Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Richard Dauenhauer for Haa Tuwunaagu Yis, for Healing Our Spirit: Tlingit Oratory
* 1991 – R. Baxter Miller for The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes
* 1991 – Thomas Centolella for Terra Firma
* 1992 – A'Lelia Perry Bundles for Madam C.J. Walker
* 1992 – Art Spiegelman for The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale
* 1992 – Benjamin Alire Saenz for Calendar of Dust
* 1992 – Donna J. Haraway for Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
* 1992 – Fritjof Capra for Belonging to the universe: Explorations on the frontiers of science and spirituality
* 1992 – Jose Antonio Burciaga for Undocumented Love/Amor Indocumentado: A Personal Anthology of Poetry
* 1992 – Keith Gilyard for Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence
* 1992 – Lucy Thompson for To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman
* 1992 – Norma Field for In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century's End
* 1992 – Peter Bacho for Cebu
* 1992 – Peter Kalifornsky for Dena'ina Legacy: K'tl'egh'i Sukdu: The Collected Writings of Peter Kalifornsky
* 1992 – Raymond Andrews for Jessie and Jesus and Cousin Claire
* 1992 – Sandra Scofield for Beyond Deserving
* 1992 – Sheila Hamanaka for Journey
* 1992 – Stephen R. Fox for The Unknown Internment: An Oral History of the Relocation of Italian Americans During World War II
* 1992 – Steven R. Carter for Hansberry's Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity,
* 1992 – Verlyn Klinkenborg for The Last Fine Time
* 1992 – William B. Branch, Amiri Baraka, August Wilson for Black Thunder: An Anthology of African-American Drama
* 1993 – Asake Bomani, Belvie Rooks for Paris Connections: African American Artists in Paris
* 1993 – Christopher Mogil, Peter Woodrow for We Gave Away a Fortune
* 1993 – Cornel West for Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times
* 1993 – Denise Giardina for Unquiet Earth
* 1993 – Diane Glancy for Claiming Breath
* 1993 – Eugene B. Redmond for The Eye in the Ceiling
* 1993 – Francisco X. Alarcon for Snake Poems
* 1993 – Gerald Graff for Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education
* 1993 – Jack Beatty for The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley
* 1993 – Leroy V. Quintana for The History of Home
* 1993 – Katherine Peter for Neets'aii Gwiindaii: Living in the Chandalar Country
* 1993 – Nelson George for Elevating the Game: Black Men and Basketball
* 1993 – Ninotchka Rosca for Twice Blessed: A Novel
* 1994 – Giose Rimanelli for Benedetta in Guysterland
* 1994 – Eric Drooker for Flood!: A Novel in Pictures
* 1994 – Graciela Limon for In Search of Bernabe
* 1994 – Gregory J. Reed for Economic Empowerment Through the Church
* 1994 – Janet Campbell Hale for Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter
* 1994 – Jill Nelson for Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience
* 1994 – Lawson Fusao Inada for Legends from Camp
* 1994 – Nicole Blackman for Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe
* 1994 – Paul Gilroy for The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness
* 1994 – Ronald Takaki for A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
* 1994 – Rose L. Glickman for Daughters of Feminists
* 1994 – Tino Villanueva for Scene from the Movie GIANT
* 1994 – Virginia L. Kroll for Wood-Hoopoe Willie
* 1995 – Abraham Rodriguez for Spidertown: A Novel
* 1995 – Herb Boyd, Robert L. Allen for Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America--An Anthology
* 1995 – Denise Chavez for Face of an Angel
* 1995 – John Egerton for Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South
* 1995 – John Ross for Rebellion from the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas
* 1995 – Thomas Avena for Life Sentences: Writers, Artists, and AIDS
* 1995 – Linda Raymond for Rocking the Babies: A Novel
* 1995 – Li-Young Lee for The Winged Seed: A Remembrance
* 1995 – Marianna De Marco Torgovnick for Crossing Ocean Parkway
* 1995 – Marnie Mueller for Green Fires: Assault on Eden: A Novel of the Ecuadorian Rainforest
* 1995 – Peter Quinn for Banished Children of Eve, A Novel of Civil War New York
* 1995 – Sandra Martz for I Am Becoming the Woman I've Wanted
* 1995 – Gordon Henry Jr. for The Light People
* 1995 – Tricia Rose for Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America
* 1996 – Agate Nesaule for A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile
* 1996 – Arthur Sze for Archipelago
* 1996 – Chang-Rae Lee for Native Speaker
* 1996 – Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni for Arranged Marriage
* 1996 – E.J. Miller Laino for Girl Hurt
* 1996 – Glenn C. Loury for One by One from the Inside Out: Race and Responsibility in America
* 1996 – James W. Loewen for Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
* 1996 – Joe Sacco, Edward Said for Palestine
* 1996 – Kimiko Hahn for Unbearable Heart, The
* 1996 – Maria Espinosa for Longing
* 1996 – Robert Viscusi for Astoria
* 1996 – Sherman Alexie for Reservation Blues
* 1996 – Ron Sakolsky, Fred Weihan Ho for Sounding Off!: Music as Resistance / Rebellion / Revolution
* 1996 – Stephanie Cowell for The Physician of London: The Second Part of the Seventeenth-Century Trilogy of Nicholas Cooke
* 1996 – William H. Gass for The Tunnel
* 1997 – Alurista for Et Tu ... Raza
* 1997 – Derrick Bell for Gospel Choirs: Psalms Of Survival In An Alien Land Called Home
* 1997 – Dorothy Barresi for The Post-Rapture Diner
* 1997 – Guillermo Gomez-Pena for The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century
* 1997 – Louis Owens for Nightland
* 1997 – Martin Espada for Imagine the Angels of Bread: Poems
* 1997 – Montserrat Fontes for Dreams of the Centaur: A Novel
* 1997 – Noel Ignatiev for Race Traitor
* 1997 – Shirley Geok-lin Lim for Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands
* 1997 – Sunaina Maira for Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America
* 1997 – Thulani Davis for Maker of Saints
* 1997 – Tom De Haven for Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies: A Novel
* 1997 – William M. Banks for Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life
* 1997 – Brenda Knight for Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution
* 1998 – Allison Adelle Hedge Coke for Dog Road Woman
* 1998 – Angela Y. Davis for Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday
* 1998 – Brenda Marie Osbey for All Saints: New and Selected Poems
* 1998 – Don DeLillo for Underworld
* 1998 – Jim Barnes for On Native Ground: Memoirs and Impressions
* 1998 – John A. Williams for Safari West: Poems
* 1998 – Nancy Rawles for Love Like Gumbo
* 1998 – Nora Okja Keller for Comfort Woman
* 1998 – Sandra Benitez for Bitter Grounds: A Novel
* 1998 – Scott DeVeaux for The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History
* 1998 – Thomas Lynch for The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade
* 1999 – Alice McDermott for Charming Billy
* 1999 – Anna Linzer for Ghost Dancing
* 1999 – Brian Ward for Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations
* 1999 – Chiori Santiago for Home to Medicine Mountain
* 1999 – E. Donald Two-Rivers for Survivor's Medicine: Short Stories
* 1999 – Edwidge Danticat for The Farming of Bones
* 1999 – Judith Roche, Meg McHutchison for First Fish, First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim
* 1999 – Gioia Timpanelli for Sometimes the Soul: Two Novellas of Sicily
* 1999 – Gloria Naylor for The Men of Brewster Place: A Novel
* 1999 – James D. Houston for The Last Paradise
* 1999 – Jerry Lipka, Gerald V. Mohatt, Ciulistet Group for Transforming the Culture of Schools: Yup¡k Eskimo Examples
* 1999 – Trey Ellis for Right Here, Right Now
* 1999 – Josip Novakovich for Salvation and Other Disasters
* 1999 – Lauro Flores for The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-Five Years of U.S. Hispanic Literature
* 1999 – Luís Alberto Urrea for Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life
* 1999 – Nelson George for Hip Hop America: Hip Hop and the Molding of Black Generation X
* 1999 – Speer Morgan for The Freshour Cylinders
* 1999 – Gary Gach for What Book!?: Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop
* 2000 – Allan J. Ryan for The Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony in Contemporary Native Art
* 2000 – Andrés Montoya for The Ice Wosrkers Sings and Other Poem
* 2000 – Camille Peri, Kate Moses for Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood
* 2000 – David A. J. Richards for Italian American: The Racializing of an Ethnic Identity
* 2000 – David Toop for Exotica
* 2000 – Elva Trevino Hart for Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child
* 2000 – Emil Guillermo for Amok: Essays from an Asian American Perspective; With an Introduction by Ishmael Reed
* 2000 – Frank Chin for The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co.
* 2000 – Helen Thomas for Front Row at the White House : My Life and Times
* 2000 – Janisse Ray for Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
* 2000 – John Russell Rickford, Russell John Rickford for Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English
* 2000 – Leroy TeCube for Year in Nam: A Native American Soldier's Story
* 2000 – Lois-Ann Yamanaka for Heads By Harry
* 2000 – Michael Lally for It's Not Nostalgia: Poetry & Prose
* 2000 – Michael Patrick MacDonald for All Souls: A Family Story from Southie
* 2000 – Rahna Reiko Rizzuto for Why She Left Us: A Novel
* 2000 – Robert Creeley for The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2005
* 2001 – Amanda J. Cobb for Listening to Our Grandmothers' Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females, 1852-1949
* 2001 – Andrea Dworkin for Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation
* 2001 – Carolyne Wright for Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire
* 2001 – Chalmers Johnson for Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
* 2001 – Cheri Register for Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir
* 2001 – Chris Ware for Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth
* 2001 – Diana Garcia for When Living Was a Labor Camp
* 2001 – Elizabeth Nunez for Bruised Hibiscus
* 2001 – Janet McAdams for Island of Lost Luggage
* 2001 – Philip Whalen for Overtime: Selected Poems
* 2001 – Russell C. Leong for Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories
* 2001 – Sandra M. Gilbert for Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems, 1969-1999
* 2001 – Ted Joans for Teducation
* 2001 – Tillie Olsen for Silences
* 2001 – William S. Penn for Killing Time With Strangers
* 2002 – Aaron Abeyta for Colcha
* 2002 – Al Young for The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems, 1990-2000
* 2002 – Alex Kuo for Lipstick and Other Stories
* 2002 – Dana Gioia for Interrogations at Noon
* 2002 – Donald Phelps for Reading the Funnies : Looking at Great Cartoonists Throughout the First Half of the 20th Century
* 2002 – Gloria Frym for Homeless at Home
* 2002 – Jack Hirschman for Front Lines
* 2002 – Jessel Miller for Angels in the Vineyards
* 2002 – LeAnne Howe for Shell Shaker
* 2002 – Lerone Bennett for Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream
* 2002 – Michael N. Nagler for Is There No Other Way? The Search for a Nonviolent Future
* 2002 – Rilla Askew for Fire in Beulah
* 2002 – Susanne Antonetta for Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir
* 2002 – Tananarive Due for The Living Blood
* 2003 – Alejandro Murguía for This War Called Love
* 2003 – Daniel Ellsberg for Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
* 2003 – Debra Magpie Earling for Perma Red
* 2003 – Eric Porter for What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists
* 2003 – Igor Krupnik for Akuzilleput Igaqullghet Our Words Put to Paper Sourcebook in St. Lawrence Island Yupik Heritage and History
* 2003 – Jack Newfield for The Full Rudy: The Man, the Myth, the Mania
* 2003 – Jewell Parker Rhodes for Douglass' Women : A Novel
* 2003 – Joseph Papaleo for Italian Stories
* 2003 – Kevin Baker for Paradise Alley
* 2003 – Rachel Simon for Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey
* 2003 – Rick Heide for Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California
* 2003 – Velma Wallis for Raising Ourselves: A Gwich'in Coming of Age Story from the Yukon River
* 2004 – A. Robert Lee for Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions
* 2004 – Charisse Jones, Kumea Shorter-Gooden for Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America
* 2004 – David Cole for Enemy Aliens: Double Standards And Constitutional Freedoms In The War On Terrorism
* 2004 – Diana Abu-Jaber for Crescent: A Novel
* 2004 – Diane Sher Lutovich for What I Stole
* 2004 – Kristin Hunter Lattany for Breaking Away
* 2004 – Michael Walsh for And All the Saints
* 2004 – Renato Rosaldo for Prayer to Spider Woman / Rezo a la Mujer Araa
* 2004 – Ruth L. Ozeki for All Over Creation
* 2004 – Scott Saul for Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties
* 2005 – Alisha S. Drabek for The Red Cedar of Afognak, A Driftwood Journey
* 2005 – Bernard W. Bell for The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots And Modern Literary Branches
* 2005 – Don Lee for Country of Origin: A Novel
* 2005 – Don West, Jeff Biggers, George Brosi for No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems
* 2005 – Hiroshi Kashiwagi for Swimming in the American: A Memoir And Selected Writings
* 2005 – Jeff Chang, D.J. Kool Herc for Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
* 2005 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy
* 2005 – Julie Chibbaro for Redemption
* 2005 – Lamont B. Steptoe for A Long Movie of Shadows
* 2005 – Ralph M. Flores for The Horse in the Kitchen: Stories of a Mexican-American Family
* 2005 – Richard A. Clarke for Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror
* 2005 – Cecelie Berry for Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on Motherhood
* 2006 – Carlton T. Spiller for Scalding Heart
* 2006 – Darryl Dickson-Carr for The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction
* 2006 – David P. Diaz for The White Tortilla: Reflections of a Second -Generation Mexican - American
* 2006 – Doris Seale for A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children
* 2006 – Jay Wright for Transfigurations: Collected Poems
* 2006 – Josh Kun for Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America
* 2006 – Kevin J. Mullen for The Toughest Gang in Town: Police Stories from Old San Francisco
* 2006 – Mackenzie Bezos for The Testing of Luther Albright: A Novel
* 2006 – Matt Briggs for Shoot the Buffalo
* 2006 – Matthew Shenoda for Somewhere Else
* 2006 – P. Lewis for Nate
* 2006 – Peter Metcalfe for Gumboot Determination: The Story of the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium
* 2006 – Thomas Ferraro for Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America
* 2006 – Tim Z. Hernandez for Skin Tax
* 2007 – Daniel Cassidy for How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads
* 2007 – Ernestine Hayes for Blonde Indian: An Alaska Native Memoir
* 2007 – Gary Panter for Jimbo's Inferno
* 2007 – Jeffrey F. L. Partridge for Beyond Literary Chinatown
* 2007 – Judith Roche for Wisdom of the Body
* 2007 – Kali Vanbaale for The Space Between
* 2007 – Michael Eric Dyson for Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster
* 2007 – Patricia Klindienst for The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic America
* 2007 – Reyna Grande for Across a Hundred Mountains: A Novel
* 2007 – Rigoberto Gonzalez for Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa
* 2008 – Moustafa Bayoumi for How Does It Feel to Be a Problem Being Young and Arab in America
* 2008 – Douglas A. Blackmon for Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
* 2008 – Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Richard Dauenhauer, and Lydia T. Black, and Anóoshi Lingít Aaní Ká for Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 And 1804
* 2008 – Maria Mazziotti Gillan for All That Lies Between Us
* 2008 – Nikki Giovanni for The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998
* 2008 – C.S. Giscombe for Prairie Style
* 2008 – Angela Jackson for Where I Must Go: A Novel
* 2008 – L. Luis Lopez for Each Month I Sing
* 2008 – Tom Lutz for Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America
* 2008 – Fae Myenne Ng for Steer Toward Rock
* 2008 – Yuko Taniguchi for The Ocean in the Closet
* 2008 – Lorenzo Thomas, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, editor for Don't Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition
* 2008 – Frank B. Wilderson III for Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid
* 2008 – Jonathan Curiel for Al’ America: Travels Through America’s Arab and Islamic Roots
* 2008 – J.J. Phillips, Author of Mojo Hand: An Orphic Tale(Lifetime Achievement Award)
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Canadian Authors Association Awards (2010)
Recipients of this year's [2010] Canadian Authors Association Awards were honored last weekend at a banquet in Victoria, B.C., Quillblog reported. The winners are:
Fiction: Galore by Michael Crummey
Canadian History: A History of Canadian Culture by Jonathan F. Vance
Drama: Talk by Michael Nathanson
Poetry: Where Genesis Begins by Tom Dawe
Emerging Writer: The Ship of Lost Souls by Rachelle Delaney
Fiction: Galore by Michael Crummey
Canadian History: A History of Canadian Culture by Jonathan F. Vance
Drama: Talk by Michael Nathanson
Poetry: Where Genesis Begins by Tom Dawe
Emerging Writer: The Ship of Lost Souls by Rachelle Delaney
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Hans Christian Andersen Awards (2010)
The shortlist for the 2010 Hans Christian Andersen Awards, given to an author and to an illustrator whose "complete works have made lasting contributions to children's literature, consists of:
Authors:
Ahmad Reza Ahmadi from Iran
David Almond from the U.K. -- Winner! -- read Skellig 2/09, Savage on TBR
Bartolomeu Campos de Queiros from Brazil
Lennart Hellsing from Sweden
Louis Jensen from Denmark
Illustrators:
Jutta Bauer from Germany -- Winner!
Carll Cneut from Belgium
Etienne Delessert from Switzerland
Svjetlan Junakovic from Croatia
Roger Mello from Brazil
The awards are given biennially by the International Board on Books for Young People. The winners will be announced on Tuesday, March 23, at the Bologna Children's Book Fair.
Authors:
Ahmad Reza Ahmadi from Iran
David Almond from the U.K. -- Winner! -- read Skellig 2/09, Savage on TBR
Bartolomeu Campos de Queiros from Brazil
Lennart Hellsing from Sweden
Louis Jensen from Denmark
Illustrators:
Jutta Bauer from Germany -- Winner!
Carll Cneut from Belgium
Etienne Delessert from Switzerland
Svjetlan Junakovic from Croatia
Roger Mello from Brazil
The awards are given biennially by the International Board on Books for Young People. The winners will be announced on Tuesday, March 23, at the Bologna Children's Book Fair.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Popular fiction by women
from Guardian's Book Blog 11/11/09
Don't patronise popular fiction by women
I'm fed up with seeing some of our best novelists written off as 'chick lit' – you don't see the same belittling line taken with male writers
Until May, I had two jobs. I was a writer, with three novels out, and I was an editor at one of the biggest publishers in the UK. I was lucky enough to work with many bestselling authors, but eventually writing won out, and now I am a crazy person sitting in my pyjamas eating jaffa cakes and wondering from where the crying baby in the basement flat suddenly materialised.
When I was an editor, my books were in the genre known for some reason as "commercial women's fiction". We – my colleagues and fellow publishers – loved these books and knew the truth, which is that books bought by women prop up the book trade, and that we should be proud both of the product itself and the diversion it gives hardworking people who want a good read. Now I've left, I'm looking at it from the other side – and what I see alarms me.
I am passionate about this kind of writing, but it seems to me to come in for an extraordinary amount of bile and patronising comment which I rarely see applied to novels by men in the same vein. Books – both fiction and non-fiction – reflecting women's lives, whether young or old, are labelled. Hence "chick-lit": often a derogatory term used to mean books by young women drinking chardonnay and being silly about boys, without the thought that novels by women about women might accurately reflect their lives and thus have merit or, at the very least, relevance.
It winds me up that books about young women are seen as frivolous and silly, while books about young men's lives that cover the same topics, are reviewed and debated, seen as valid and interesting contributions to the current social and media scene. Take anything from Toby Young's How To Lose Friends and Alienate People to The Contortionist's Handbook to Toby Litt or David Nicholls's One Day, or the works of Dave Eggers and Jonathan Lethem. Often these books are far more sensationalist than those by the authors' female counterparts: about how many women the protagonists have slept with, how many drugs they've done, what a crazy nihilistic time they're having in London / New York. I'm not saying they're bad books: Jonathan Lethem is one of my favourite writers and One Day is probably my book of the year. I'm just saying they aren't belittled and dismissed in the same way on the grounds of their subject-matter.
The truth is, women happily read books (and watch films and TV) aimed primarily at men. That's because women buy more and read more, full stop. They read thrillers, travel books, biographies – and yet the majority of these books are marketed for men. Women know they'll like it and give it a go. They'll happily pick up a copy of Porno, with a plastic female sex doll on the front. But men rarely try women's fiction, because they've been conditioned to think they can't pick up a book with a pink cover.
It's a real shame, because if you want to read someone who reflects women (and men's) lives with authenticity and sharp observation, someone whose books will absorb you and make you cry, there are so many options. You can do no better than Lisa Jewell or Emily Barr, or the high priestess of "commercial women's fiction", Marian Keyes. For me, The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank is note-perfect, one of the best books of the last 10 years. Lauren Weisberger's The Devil Wears Prada is like a thriller of first-job hell, it's so tautly written. And Jennifer Weiner (Good in Bed, In Her Shoes, Little Earthquakes) is a genius. Her books are totally gripping, beautifully written, heartbreaking and hilarious. But I have yet to see a review of her which reflects this, except in magazines like Heat, which takes its commercial fiction seriously.
And don't get me started on the criminally undervalued women writers of the previous half-century: Dorothy Whipple, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, even Joanna Trollope, who I think should be taught for A-level, she's so good.
It amuses me when people say, "Oh, it's a bit like Jane Austen", to denote a writer of romantic novels or sharp-eyed stories about mousy young women (Barbara Pym is always being compared to Jane Austen, I guess because they both write about spinsters. She's nothing like her.) There's something a little patronising about the tone of it, whereas books by young men are compared to older male writers as if it's a coronation, a welcoming to the literary canon. And quite often I'm left wanting to go – huh? I don't get it. There's room for both. And I know which I'd prefer to read.
Harriet Evans Posted by Harriet Evans Wednesday 11 November 2009 15.51 GMT guardian.co.uk
Don't patronise popular fiction by women
I'm fed up with seeing some of our best novelists written off as 'chick lit' – you don't see the same belittling line taken with male writers
Until May, I had two jobs. I was a writer, with three novels out, and I was an editor at one of the biggest publishers in the UK. I was lucky enough to work with many bestselling authors, but eventually writing won out, and now I am a crazy person sitting in my pyjamas eating jaffa cakes and wondering from where the crying baby in the basement flat suddenly materialised.
When I was an editor, my books were in the genre known for some reason as "commercial women's fiction". We – my colleagues and fellow publishers – loved these books and knew the truth, which is that books bought by women prop up the book trade, and that we should be proud both of the product itself and the diversion it gives hardworking people who want a good read. Now I've left, I'm looking at it from the other side – and what I see alarms me.
I am passionate about this kind of writing, but it seems to me to come in for an extraordinary amount of bile and patronising comment which I rarely see applied to novels by men in the same vein. Books – both fiction and non-fiction – reflecting women's lives, whether young or old, are labelled. Hence "chick-lit": often a derogatory term used to mean books by young women drinking chardonnay and being silly about boys, without the thought that novels by women about women might accurately reflect their lives and thus have merit or, at the very least, relevance.
It winds me up that books about young women are seen as frivolous and silly, while books about young men's lives that cover the same topics, are reviewed and debated, seen as valid and interesting contributions to the current social and media scene. Take anything from Toby Young's How To Lose Friends and Alienate People to The Contortionist's Handbook to Toby Litt or David Nicholls's One Day, or the works of Dave Eggers and Jonathan Lethem. Often these books are far more sensationalist than those by the authors' female counterparts: about how many women the protagonists have slept with, how many drugs they've done, what a crazy nihilistic time they're having in London / New York. I'm not saying they're bad books: Jonathan Lethem is one of my favourite writers and One Day is probably my book of the year. I'm just saying they aren't belittled and dismissed in the same way on the grounds of their subject-matter.
The truth is, women happily read books (and watch films and TV) aimed primarily at men. That's because women buy more and read more, full stop. They read thrillers, travel books, biographies – and yet the majority of these books are marketed for men. Women know they'll like it and give it a go. They'll happily pick up a copy of Porno, with a plastic female sex doll on the front. But men rarely try women's fiction, because they've been conditioned to think they can't pick up a book with a pink cover.
It's a real shame, because if you want to read someone who reflects women (and men's) lives with authenticity and sharp observation, someone whose books will absorb you and make you cry, there are so many options. You can do no better than Lisa Jewell or Emily Barr, or the high priestess of "commercial women's fiction", Marian Keyes. For me, The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank is note-perfect, one of the best books of the last 10 years. Lauren Weisberger's The Devil Wears Prada is like a thriller of first-job hell, it's so tautly written. And Jennifer Weiner (Good in Bed, In Her Shoes, Little Earthquakes) is a genius. Her books are totally gripping, beautifully written, heartbreaking and hilarious. But I have yet to see a review of her which reflects this, except in magazines like Heat, which takes its commercial fiction seriously.
And don't get me started on the criminally undervalued women writers of the previous half-century: Dorothy Whipple, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, even Joanna Trollope, who I think should be taught for A-level, she's so good.
It amuses me when people say, "Oh, it's a bit like Jane Austen", to denote a writer of romantic novels or sharp-eyed stories about mousy young women (Barbara Pym is always being compared to Jane Austen, I guess because they both write about spinsters. She's nothing like her.) There's something a little patronising about the tone of it, whereas books by young men are compared to older male writers as if it's a coronation, a welcoming to the literary canon. And quite often I'm left wanting to go – huh? I don't get it. There's room for both. And I know which I'd prefer to read.
Harriet Evans Posted by Harriet Evans Wednesday 11 November 2009 15.51 GMT guardian.co.uk
Monday, October 5, 2009
Philip Pullman's essential reading list
Philip Pullman's essential reading list
40 favourite books selected for the Waterstone's Writer's Table
COMPLETE POEMS
by Elizabeth Bishop
How simple some great poetry can seem - as x` as water, and as necessary. Bishop is incomparable: “Awful, but cheerful,” she said.
THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY
by Robert Burton
A vast rickety structure of learning, wit, sense, nonsense, bizarre anecdotes, kindness, and wisdom. A humane guide and antidote to this terrible affliction.
A PERFECT SPY
by John le Carré
A perfect blend of form, subject, sensibility and moral power. Le Carré's best book, and one of the finest English novels of the 20th century.
KOLYMSKY HEIGHTS
by Lionel Davidson
The best thriller I've ever read, and I've read plenty. A solidly researched and bone-chilling adventure in a savage setting, with a superb hero.
THE ANCESTOR'S TALE
by Richard Dawkins
Dawkins at his very best: a beautiful clarity of exposition, and an unslaked sense of wonder at the grandeur, richness and complexity of nature.
THE COMPLETE BRIGADIER GERARD STORIES
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Everyone knows Sherlock Holmes, but Brigadier Gerard is a marvellous creation - proud, valiant and absurd.
THE LETTERS OF VINCENT VAN GOGH
On the evidence of these honest, revealing and very moving letters, the greatest painter was a great writer as well; and his brother was a saint.
ART AND ILLUSION
by E.H. Gombrich
This is all about the mysterious business of looking and seeing, and E.H. Gombrich looked deeper and saw more than almost any other writer on art.
THE COMPLETE FAIRY TALES
by the Brothers Grimm
The fountain, the origin. Read one of these stories every day and your narrative taste will be purified, strengthened and refreshed.
THE CASTAFIORE EMERALD
by Hergé
Hergé was the best at everything: plots, draughtsmanship, jokes, characterisation, timing - he could do the lot, and this is his best book.
THE PRIVATE MEMOIRS AND CONFESSIONS OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER
by James Hogg
A brilliant, chilling and subtle account of religious derangement. Every self-righteous fundamentalist ought to read this, but of course they won't.
COUNT MAGNUS AND OTHER GHOST STORIES
by M.R. James
I don't believe in ghosts, but I'm frightened of them. They don't come any scarier than in these superb examples of the classic English ghost story.
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
by William James
The most interesting thing about religion: not whether it's true, but what it feels like, explored by a psychologist of great intelligence and sympathy.
FINN FAMILY MOOMINTROLL
by Tove Jansson
The delight of the Moomin world always trembles on the brink of melancholy; its subtle and fascinating atmosphere is a triumph of the storyteller's art.
KIM
by Rudyard Kipling
A story about a boy in India, who ... But no summary can do this marvellous, rich and unforgettable novel anything like justice.
THE MARQUISE OF O
by Heinrich Von Kleist
A very strange writer: intense almost to the point of madness, but what a penetrating mind, and what sharpness and clarity of vision.
A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS
by David Lindsay
As literature, this is tosh. Nevertheless, it's a work of epic moral grandeur, and one of the very few fantasies to do something truly original and important with the genre.
THE MAGIC PUDDING
by Norman Lindsay
The best thing yet to come out of Australia, and that includes Shane Warne. If anyone can read this without laughing, heaven help them.
LAVENDER'S BLUE
edited by Kathleen Lines
Every household needs a collection of nursery rhymes, which are the foundation of every kind of success with language. This has always been my favourite.
VENICE FOR PLEASURE
by J.G. Links
Whether in prospect or in retrospect, or there in one's hands in the city itself, the most informative and engaging guide to the past and present of Venice.
THE CALL OF CTHULHU
by H.P. Lovecraft
Preposterous, overblown, absurd in every way - yet with an originality that looks more powerful and convincing each time I dip into it.
BUDDENBROOKS
by Thomas Mann
How could a 25-year-old know so much, and write so perceptively? The first of Mann's great novels, and still astonishing today.
THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
by Robert Musil
The greatest condition-of-Europe novel, but much more than a profound diagnosis - it's enormously funny, apart from anything else. I never tire of it.
THE BEST OF MYLES
by Flann O'Brien
The best collection of the funniest newspaper columns ever written. It's as simple as that. After this, read his The Third Policeman.
THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS
by Elaine Pagels
We live in Gnostic times. This is a clear account of the strange and intoxicating religion that nearly supplanted orthodox Christianity in its earliest years.
THE EMPEROR'S NEW MIND
by Roger Penrose
This is an age of great writing about science, and here is some of the finest. Penrose's knowledge is awe-inspiring in its reach and completeness.
THE BOOK OF DISQUIET
by Fernando Pessoa
The very book to read when you wake at 3am and can't get back to sleep - mysteries, misgivings, fears and dreams and wonderment. Like nothing else.
WOLF SOLENT
by John Cowper Powys
Powys evoked the English landscape with an almost sexual intensity. Hardy comes to mind, but a Hardy drunk and feverish with mystical exuberance.
EXERCISES IN STYLE
by Raymond Queneau
A pointless anecdote told in 99 different ways, or a work of genius in a brilliant translation by Barbara Wright. In fact it's both. Endlessly fascinating and very funny.
WE DIDN'T MEAN TO GO TO SEA
by Arthur Ransome
Ransome never strayed beyond the realistic, but what an exciting story this is: danger, courage, skilful seamanship, and a real respect for his young protagonists.
DUINO ELEGIES
by Rainer Maria Rilke
The deepest mysteries of existence embodied in the most delicate and precise images. For me, the greatest poetry of the 20th century.
SELECTED WRITINGS
by John Ruskin
The best way to read this great and life-enhancing writer is in short and well-chosen excerpts. Earnest, unfashionable, no doubt; but profoundly wise and truthful.
THE COMPLETE MAUS
by Art Spiegelman
The complete answer to all those who still doubt the potential of comics. Spiegelman is a genius, and no other form could have told this story so well.
WALLACE STEVENS (POET TO POET)
edited by John Burnside
Wallace Stevens speaks more interestingly, and more memorably, about the things that matter most to me than any other poet. I can't imagine being without his work.
THE NEW BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF FILM
by David Thomson
Opinionated, slightly cranky, vastly entertaining, endlessly informative. Of all the reference books I have, this is always the hardest to put down.
COUNTRY OF THE BLIND AND OTHER SELECTED STORIES
by H.G. Wells
In these short stories we can feel a whole genre just beginning to spread its wings, and test its strength, and take to the air.
MOLESWORTH
by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle
As any fule kno, this is the best marriage of writer and illustrator since ... well, since William Blake, really. Still funny after 50 years.
SUMMER LIGHTNING
by P.G. Wodehouse
Wodehouse had the extraordinary ability to evoke innocence without being in the least boring, all in a prose style that lightens the spirits like champagne.
THE ART OF MEMORY
by Frances A. Yates
Yates re-imagined the whole intellectual world of the Renaissance, and laid bare the odd and secret beliefs buried in the foundations of the times we still live in today.
© 2008 Philip Pullman
Philip Pullman's Writer's Table will launch in selected Waterstone's stores on Thursday September 4. Find out more at www.waterstones.com/writerstable
40 favourite books selected for the Waterstone's Writer's Table
COMPLETE POEMS
by Elizabeth Bishop
How simple some great poetry can seem - as x` as water, and as necessary. Bishop is incomparable: “Awful, but cheerful,” she said.
THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY
by Robert Burton
A vast rickety structure of learning, wit, sense, nonsense, bizarre anecdotes, kindness, and wisdom. A humane guide and antidote to this terrible affliction.
A PERFECT SPY
by John le Carré
A perfect blend of form, subject, sensibility and moral power. Le Carré's best book, and one of the finest English novels of the 20th century.
THE WOMAN IN WHITE by Wilkie Collins
For sheer plotting genius, Collins had no rival. If you've never read this, I can promise you one of the most gripping stories of all time.KOLYMSKY HEIGHTS
by Lionel Davidson
The best thriller I've ever read, and I've read plenty. A solidly researched and bone-chilling adventure in a savage setting, with a superb hero.
THE ANCESTOR'S TALE
by Richard Dawkins
Dawkins at his very best: a beautiful clarity of exposition, and an unslaked sense of wonder at the grandeur, richness and complexity of nature.
THE COMPLETE BRIGADIER GERARD STORIES
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Everyone knows Sherlock Holmes, but Brigadier Gerard is a marvellous creation - proud, valiant and absurd.
THE LETTERS OF VINCENT VAN GOGH
On the evidence of these honest, revealing and very moving letters, the greatest painter was a great writer as well; and his brother was a saint.
ART AND ILLUSION
by E.H. Gombrich
This is all about the mysterious business of looking and seeing, and E.H. Gombrich looked deeper and saw more than almost any other writer on art.
THE COMPLETE FAIRY TALES
by the Brothers Grimm
The fountain, the origin. Read one of these stories every day and your narrative taste will be purified, strengthened and refreshed.
THE CASTAFIORE EMERALD
by Hergé
Hergé was the best at everything: plots, draughtsmanship, jokes, characterisation, timing - he could do the lot, and this is his best book.
THE PRIVATE MEMOIRS AND CONFESSIONS OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER
by James Hogg
A brilliant, chilling and subtle account of religious derangement. Every self-righteous fundamentalist ought to read this, but of course they won't.
COUNT MAGNUS AND OTHER GHOST STORIES
by M.R. James
I don't believe in ghosts, but I'm frightened of them. They don't come any scarier than in these superb examples of the classic English ghost story.
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
by William James
The most interesting thing about religion: not whether it's true, but what it feels like, explored by a psychologist of great intelligence and sympathy.
FINN FAMILY MOOMINTROLL
by Tove Jansson
The delight of the Moomin world always trembles on the brink of melancholy; its subtle and fascinating atmosphere is a triumph of the storyteller's art.
KIM
by Rudyard Kipling
A story about a boy in India, who ... But no summary can do this marvellous, rich and unforgettable novel anything like justice.
THE MARQUISE OF O
by Heinrich Von Kleist
A very strange writer: intense almost to the point of madness, but what a penetrating mind, and what sharpness and clarity of vision.
A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS
by David Lindsay
As literature, this is tosh. Nevertheless, it's a work of epic moral grandeur, and one of the very few fantasies to do something truly original and important with the genre.
THE MAGIC PUDDING
by Norman Lindsay
The best thing yet to come out of Australia, and that includes Shane Warne. If anyone can read this without laughing, heaven help them.
LAVENDER'S BLUE
edited by Kathleen Lines
Every household needs a collection of nursery rhymes, which are the foundation of every kind of success with language. This has always been my favourite.
VENICE FOR PLEASURE
by J.G. Links
Whether in prospect or in retrospect, or there in one's hands in the city itself, the most informative and engaging guide to the past and present of Venice.
THE CALL OF CTHULHU
by H.P. Lovecraft
Preposterous, overblown, absurd in every way - yet with an originality that looks more powerful and convincing each time I dip into it.
BUDDENBROOKS
by Thomas Mann
How could a 25-year-old know so much, and write so perceptively? The first of Mann's great novels, and still astonishing today.
THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
by Robert Musil
The greatest condition-of-Europe novel, but much more than a profound diagnosis - it's enormously funny, apart from anything else. I never tire of it.
THE BEST OF MYLES
by Flann O'Brien
The best collection of the funniest newspaper columns ever written. It's as simple as that. After this, read his The Third Policeman.
THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS
by Elaine Pagels
We live in Gnostic times. This is a clear account of the strange and intoxicating religion that nearly supplanted orthodox Christianity in its earliest years.
THE EMPEROR'S NEW MIND
by Roger Penrose
This is an age of great writing about science, and here is some of the finest. Penrose's knowledge is awe-inspiring in its reach and completeness.
THE BOOK OF DISQUIET
by Fernando Pessoa
The very book to read when you wake at 3am and can't get back to sleep - mysteries, misgivings, fears and dreams and wonderment. Like nothing else.
WOLF SOLENT
by John Cowper Powys
Powys evoked the English landscape with an almost sexual intensity. Hardy comes to mind, but a Hardy drunk and feverish with mystical exuberance.
EXERCISES IN STYLE
by Raymond Queneau
A pointless anecdote told in 99 different ways, or a work of genius in a brilliant translation by Barbara Wright. In fact it's both. Endlessly fascinating and very funny.
WE DIDN'T MEAN TO GO TO SEA
by Arthur Ransome
Ransome never strayed beyond the realistic, but what an exciting story this is: danger, courage, skilful seamanship, and a real respect for his young protagonists.
DUINO ELEGIES
by Rainer Maria Rilke
The deepest mysteries of existence embodied in the most delicate and precise images. For me, the greatest poetry of the 20th century.
SELECTED WRITINGS
by John Ruskin
The best way to read this great and life-enhancing writer is in short and well-chosen excerpts. Earnest, unfashionable, no doubt; but profoundly wise and truthful.
THE COMPLETE MAUS
by Art Spiegelman
The complete answer to all those who still doubt the potential of comics. Spiegelman is a genius, and no other form could have told this story so well.
WALLACE STEVENS (POET TO POET)
edited by John Burnside
Wallace Stevens speaks more interestingly, and more memorably, about the things that matter most to me than any other poet. I can't imagine being without his work.
THE NEW BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF FILM
by David Thomson
Opinionated, slightly cranky, vastly entertaining, endlessly informative. Of all the reference books I have, this is always the hardest to put down.
COUNTRY OF THE BLIND AND OTHER SELECTED STORIES
by H.G. Wells
In these short stories we can feel a whole genre just beginning to spread its wings, and test its strength, and take to the air.
MOLESWORTH
by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle
As any fule kno, this is the best marriage of writer and illustrator since ... well, since William Blake, really. Still funny after 50 years.
SUMMER LIGHTNING
by P.G. Wodehouse
Wodehouse had the extraordinary ability to evoke innocence without being in the least boring, all in a prose style that lightens the spirits like champagne.
THE ART OF MEMORY
by Frances A. Yates
Yates re-imagined the whole intellectual world of the Renaissance, and laid bare the odd and secret beliefs buried in the foundations of the times we still live in today.
© 2008 Philip Pullman
Philip Pullman's Writer's Table will launch in selected Waterstone's stores on Thursday September 4. Find out more at www.waterstones.com/writerstable
Monday, September 28, 2009
The Wasafiri List
As reported in Shelf Awareness 092809, taken from The Guardian
Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude topped a list of books that have most shaped world literature over the past 25 years, as chosen by "Indra Sinha, Blake Morrison, Amit Chaudhuri and 22 other authors . . . The survey was conducted by the international literary magazine Wasafiri--meaning 'cultural traveller' in Swahili," the Guardian reported.
The Wasafiri list:
Aminatta Forna--The Famished Road by Ben Okri
Amit Chaudhuri--Collected Poems by Elizabeth Bishop
Bernardine Evaristo--Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain by Peter Fryer
Beverley Naidoo--Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor
Blake Morrison--The Stories of Raymond Carver by Raymond Carver
Brian Chikwava--The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Chika Unigwe--One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Daljit Nagra--North by Seamus Heaney
David Dabydeen--A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
Elaine Feinstein--Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes
Fred D'Aguiar--Palace of the Peacock by Wilson Harris
Hirsh Sawhney--River of Fire by Quarratulain Hyder
Indra Sinha--Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
John Haynes--Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
Lesley Lokko--Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Maggie Gee--Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
Marina Warner--Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
Maya Jaggi--The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
Michael Horovitz--Collected Poems by Allen Ginsberg
Minoli Salgado--Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje
Nii Parkes--One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Roger Robinson--Sula by Toni Morrison
Sujata Bhatt--One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Sukhdev Sandhu--The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Dr. Li Zhisui
Tabish Khair--The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude topped a list of books that have most shaped world literature over the past 25 years, as chosen by "Indra Sinha, Blake Morrison, Amit Chaudhuri and 22 other authors . . . The survey was conducted by the international literary magazine Wasafiri--meaning 'cultural traveller' in Swahili," the Guardian reported.
The Wasafiri list:
Aminatta Forna--The Famished Road by Ben Okri
Amit Chaudhuri--Collected Poems by Elizabeth Bishop
Bernardine Evaristo--Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain by Peter Fryer
Beverley Naidoo--Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor
Blake Morrison--The Stories of Raymond Carver by Raymond Carver
Brian Chikwava--The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Chika Unigwe--One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Daljit Nagra--North by Seamus Heaney
David Dabydeen--A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
Elaine Feinstein--Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes
Fred D'Aguiar--Palace of the Peacock by Wilson Harris
Hirsh Sawhney--River of Fire by Quarratulain Hyder
Indra Sinha--Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
John Haynes--Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
Lesley Lokko--Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Maggie Gee--Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
Marina Warner--Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
Maya Jaggi--The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
Michael Horovitz--Collected Poems by Allen Ginsberg
Minoli Salgado--Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje
Nii Parkes--One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Roger Robinson--Sula by Toni Morrison
Sujata Bhatt--One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Sukhdev Sandhu--The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Dr. Li Zhisui
Tabish Khair--The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Monday, September 21, 2009
Contemporary English-Language Authors
The List of Contemporary English-Language Authors to Read
from Conversational Reading by Scott Esposito
With a big assist from the commenters on this post, here's what I think I need to read. Point out everything I missed in the comments. And please let me know of anyone overrated that I shouldn't waste my time with.
Lorrie Moore. People were pretty clear that I should avoid her latest novel and give the stories a try. So I suppose I'll start with her first collection, Self-Help.
Brian Evenson. Seems like the place to start with Brian Evenson is Last Days (an endorsement that seems to be echoed in Matt Bell's excellent essay), although I already have a copy of Fugue State, so I might just start there.
A.M. Homes. I'm not really sure where to start with her, but I found Music for Torching at a garage sale yesterday for a buck, so that's probably going to be it.
Curtis White. At that same garage sale (actually, it was a "block sale," I found Requiem by Curtis White, one of the American postmodernists I haven't yet gotten to.
David Markson. Speaking of White, David Markson is a known quantity, but he should definitely be on this list.
Chris Adrian. I have yet to find anyone who doesn't absolutely love this guy's work. I myself was amazed by The Children's Hospital. Looks like next I'll go with A Better Angel, the latest story collection.
Percival Everett. This guy has been in the back of my mind for a while now. Definitely someone to try out. I was recommended to start with American Desert . . . any ideas?
Kevin Wilson. Was told to give this guy a shot in the company of George Saunders (someone I should read a little more systematically). So is Tunneling to the Center of the Earth the place to start?
Margaret Atwood. Reading the coverage of her most recent novel, I am reminded again of what a strong body of work she has put together. I should really at least get started with her. The Handmaid's Tale is the obvious place to start, but from there where to?
Steven Millhauser. He definitely seems like someone doing good work. Is Dangerous Laughter the one to start with?
Aleksandar Hemon. Seems pretty clearly worth keeping an eye on.
Tom McCarthy. His body of work is only three books deep at this point, but Tom Mccarthy definitely seems like someone to watch.
Joe Meno. His latest has been getting good reviews, and he has a lot out there. Worth it?
Ron Currie, Jr. Although he has just a short story collection and a first novel to his name, we've given each very strong reviews, and he seems like an extremely promising author.
from Conversational Reading by Scott Esposito
With a big assist from the commenters on this post, here's what I think I need to read. Point out everything I missed in the comments. And please let me know of anyone overrated that I shouldn't waste my time with.
Lorrie Moore. People were pretty clear that I should avoid her latest novel and give the stories a try. So I suppose I'll start with her first collection, Self-Help.
Brian Evenson. Seems like the place to start with Brian Evenson is Last Days (an endorsement that seems to be echoed in Matt Bell's excellent essay), although I already have a copy of Fugue State, so I might just start there.
A.M. Homes. I'm not really sure where to start with her, but I found Music for Torching at a garage sale yesterday for a buck, so that's probably going to be it.
Curtis White. At that same garage sale (actually, it was a "block sale," I found Requiem by Curtis White, one of the American postmodernists I haven't yet gotten to.
David Markson. Speaking of White, David Markson is a known quantity, but he should definitely be on this list.
Chris Adrian. I have yet to find anyone who doesn't absolutely love this guy's work. I myself was amazed by The Children's Hospital. Looks like next I'll go with A Better Angel, the latest story collection.
Percival Everett. This guy has been in the back of my mind for a while now. Definitely someone to try out. I was recommended to start with American Desert . . . any ideas?
Kevin Wilson. Was told to give this guy a shot in the company of George Saunders (someone I should read a little more systematically). So is Tunneling to the Center of the Earth the place to start?
Margaret Atwood. Reading the coverage of her most recent novel, I am reminded again of what a strong body of work she has put together. I should really at least get started with her. The Handmaid's Tale is the obvious place to start, but from there where to?
Steven Millhauser. He definitely seems like someone doing good work. Is Dangerous Laughter the one to start with?
Aleksandar Hemon. Seems pretty clearly worth keeping an eye on.
Tom McCarthy. His body of work is only three books deep at this point, but Tom Mccarthy definitely seems like someone to watch.
Joe Meno. His latest has been getting good reviews, and he has a lot out there. Worth it?
Ron Currie, Jr. Although he has just a short story collection and a first novel to his name, we've given each very strong reviews, and he seems like an extremely promising author.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Bard Fiction Prize
The Bard Fiction Prize
is awarded to a promising, emerging writer who is an American citizen aged 39 years or younger at the time of application. In addition to the monetary award, the winner receives an appointment as writer in residence at Bard College for one semester, without the expectation that he or she teach traditional courses. The recipient gives at least one public lecture and meets informally with students.
2009 Bard Fiction Prize Recipient:
Fiona Maazel
The creation of the Bard Fiction Prize, presented each October, continues Bard's long-standing position as a center for creative, groundbreaking literary work by both faculty and students. From Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, Mary McCarthy, and Ralph Ellison to John Ashbery, Philip Roth, William Weaver, and Chinua Achebe, Bard's literature faculty, past and present, represents some of the most important American writers of our time. The prize is intended to encourage and support young writers of fiction to pursue their creative goals and provide an opportunity to work in a fertile and intellectual environment.
Previous Winners:
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
E. M. Forster Award
The E. M. Forster Award is a $20,000 award given annually to an Irish or British writer to fund a period of travel in the United States. The award, named after the English novelist E. M. Forster, is administered by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Academy members nominate authors and winners are selected by a rotating committee.
Past winners
E.M. Forster Award
Foreign Honorary Member E.M. Forster (1879-1970) bequeathed the American publication rights and royalties of his posthumous novel Maurice to Academician Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986), who transferred them to the Academy for the establishment of an award, now $15,000, to be given to a young English writer for a stay in the United States.
Name
Year
John Lanchester
2008
Jez Butterworth -- playwright
2007
Geoff Dyer
2006
Dennis O'Driscoll
2005
Robin Robertson
2004
Andrew O'Hagan
2003
Helen Simpson
2002
Marina Carr
2001
Carol Ann Duffy
2000
Nick Hornby
1999
Kate Atkinson
1998
Glyn Maxwell
1997
Jim Crace
1996
Colm Toibin
1995
Janice Galloway
1994
Sean O'Brien
1993
Timothy Mo
1992
Alan Hollinghurst
1991
Jeanette Winterson
1990
A. N. Wilson
1989
Blake Morrison
1988
Julian Barnes
1986
Humphrey Carpenter
1984
F.T. Prince
Bruce Chatwin
1979
David Cook
1977
Jon Stallworthy
1976
Seamus Heaney
1975
Paul Bailey
1974
Margaret Drabble
1973
Frank Tuohy
1972
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