Lydia Davis (1988) has been awarded the fifth Man Booker International Prize at an award ceremony at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The prize, worth £60,000, is awarded for an achievement in Fiction on the world stage.
Congratulations to Adam Johnson (2009), whose novel, The Orphan Master’s Son (Random House), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and was cited as “an exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart.”
Fellowships announced by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation include ones for Major Jackson (2002) and Joshua Weiner (2003) in Poetry and Adam Johnson (2009), Ben Marcus (1999), and Colson Whitehead (2000) in Fiction.
Among the recipients of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Awards in Literature, which honor exceptional accomplishment in any genre, are Bruce Norris (2006) and Darryl Pinckney (1986). Amy Herzog (2011) has been awarded the Benjamin H. Danks Award of $20,000 given every three years to an exceptional young playwright. Lydia Davis (1988) has been given the Award of Merit Medal and $10,000 for an outstanding short story writer, given every six years. Mischa Berlinski (2008) has won the Addison M.Metcalf Award of $10,000 to a young writer of fiction, nonfiction, drama or poetry.
Publisher’s Weekly included Anthony Marra‘s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and Benjamin Percy‘s Red Moon in their round-up of the Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2013 http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/55605-the-most-anticipated-books-of-spring-2013.html
Ben Fountain (2007) is the National Book Critics Circle award winner in Fiction for Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk (Ecco).
The Academy of American Poets announced the election of three new chancellors; among them is C. D. Wright (1989).
Congratulations to 2013 NEA Fellows in Poetry and Whiting Writers Eduardo C. Corral (2011), Shane McCrae (2011) and Atsuro Riley (2012)
Tracy K. Smith (2005) is the 2012 Pulitzer Prize winner in Poetry for her book, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press)
Bridghe Mullins (2001) has been awarded a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama & Performance Art.
Ben Fountain (2007) has just published his second book – and first novel – entitled Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk in May, 2012 with Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Nell Freudenberger (2005) published her third book and second novel, The Newlyweds, with Knopf in May 2012.
Luc Sante (1989) has been chosen as a Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers for 2012-13. He will be working on a documentary novel, Declare Present Time Over, about the end of bohemia, 1979-82.
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh (2010) has a first collection of short stories coming out with The Dial Press in 2013. He will be a Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers for 2012-13. His project there is a second collection of stories based on the New York City draft riots of 1863.
John Wray (2001) is working on his fourth novel, The Lost Time Accidents, about a century in the life of a family of renegade physicists. In 2012-13, he will be a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
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I aspire to expressing sorts of feelings, of mental states or experiences that are just on the border of the expressible. Making something that is actually quite beautiful— that’s my deep drive. Also to make something that’s extremely accurate to these very, very subtle states of mind. I think that fiction has a capacity for truthfulness that, really, no other prose form has.
Deborah Eisenberg
Whiting Writers’ Award Winner 1987