First-ever Carnegie Awards in Literature go to Enright, Massie

The first-ever Andrew Carnegie Awards for Excellence in Literature were announced in a ceremony Sunday night at the American Library Assn. conference in Anaheim. Awards were given in two categories, fiction and nonfiction. The biography "Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman" by Robert K. Massie took the nonfiction prize; Anne Enright's novel "The Forgotten Waltz" won in fiction.

Up to now, the American Library Assn.'s prizes have focused on books for children and young adults; the prestigious Newbery and Caldecott medals are among the organization's awards. For the inaugural Carnegie Awards, librarians and library professionals chose the winners, working in consultation with adult readers.

"Catherine the Great" was lauded by the American Library Assn. as "A compulsively readable biography of the fascinating woman who, through a combination of luck, personality, and a fine mind, rose from her birth as a minor German princess to become the Empress of all the Russias." Massie has become something of an imperial biographer; he is the author of "Nicholas and Alexandra" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Peter the Great."

"The vicissitudes of extramarital love and the obstructions to its smooth flow—including spouses, children, and the necessary secrecy surrounding an affair—are charted in sharp yet supple prose," the organization writes of "The Forgotten Waltz" by Anne Enright. In our review Joy Press explains, "Gina is not so much an unreliable narrator as someone obsessed with her own unreliability. Dissecting her love affair with married man Sean Vallely, she constantly doubles back on her own thoughts and memories, gamely trying to pinpoint the moment when her conventional middle-class life — complete with husband and mortgage — dissolved into something darker and more complicated."

The two books were selected from short lists of finalists. They're after the jump.

First-time author Madeline Miller wins last-ever Orange Prize

American author Madeline Miller was awarded the Orange Prize for fiction at a ceremony in London on Wednesday. It was for Miller's first book, the novel "The Song of Achilles," and marked the occasion of the last Orange Prize, worth about $47,000.

This month it was announced that telecom company Orange would cease sponsoring the 17-year-old prize, which is awarded to a female author for a work of fiction written in English.

Newcomer Miller was the dark horse in this year's race. In the surprise win, she beat out prior Orange Prize winner Ann Patchett, octogenarian Cynthia Ozick, Man Booker Prize finalist Esi Edugyan, Brit Georgiana Harding and Irish Man Booker Prize winner Anne Enright. They posed some serious literary competition.

Miller, however, won over the judges with "The Song of Achilles," told by Patroclus, a peripheral but significant figure in "The Illilad." Click here to read an online excerpt.

Miller was born in Boston and grew up with a lasting love of the classics; she currently teaches Latin in New England. On her website, the author explains where she got the idea for a key element of story -- that Patroclus and Achilles had a love affair.

I stole it from Plato! The idea that Patroclus and Achilles were lovers is quite old.  Many Greco-Roman authors read their relationship as a romantic one—it was a common and accepted interpretation in the ancient world.  We even have a fragment from a lost tragedy of Aeschylus, where Achilles speaks of his and Patroclus’ “frequent kisses.”

There is a lot of support for their relationship in the text of the Iliad itself, though Homer never makes it explicit.  For me, the most compelling piece of evidence, aside from the depth of Achilles’ grief, is how he grieves: Achilles refuses to burn Patroclus’ body, insisting instead on keeping the corpse in his tent, where he constantly weeps and embraces it—despite the horrified reactions of those around him. That sense of physical devastation spoke deeply to me of a true and total intimacy between the two men.

In a press release, Joanna Trollope, chair of the judges, praised the book, saying, "This is a more than worthy winner — original, passionate, inventive and uplifting. Homer would be proud of her."

Prior winners of the Orange Prize include Tea Obreht, Barbara Kingsolver, Lionel Shriver, Carol Shields, Marilynne Robinson and Zadie Smith. After the departure of its sponsor, the prize plans to continue, but presumably with a new, not-yet-identified name.

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The Orange Prize to lose its color

2012: Orange Prize shortlist

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Madeline Miller, right, gets the news of her win from judge Joanna Trollope. Credit: Lefteris Pitarakis / Associated Press

Orange Prize to lose its color

Britain's Orange Prize for Fiction, which is annually awarded to a female author, will cease to be orange after the 2012 award is presented next week. That's because the Orange Prize is sponsored by Orange, a British mobile communications company, which after 17 years has decided to end its association with the prize.

According to the Bookseller, Orange plans to move its arts support to movie projects.

Orange was the originating sponsor of the Orange Prize when it was founded in 1996. Nevertheless, Orange Prize co-founder -- or, erm, Prize for Fiction co-founder -- Kate Mosse put a positive spin on the change.

This is the end of an era, but no major arts project should stand still. We are very much looking forward to developing the Prize for the future and working with a new sponsor to ensure the Prize grows and plays an even more significant part in the years to come.

We are in active discussions with a number of potential new brand partners and look forward to the start of another exciting chapter for the Prize.

British literary prizes have been successful at attracting corporate sponsorships. In addition to the Orange Prize, there's the Booker -- the Man Booker, thanks to the Man investing company. In the U.S., non-literary companies have not been quick to underwrite literary awards. Although that didn't stop book consultant Bella Stander from quipping, "Apple should take over Orange Prize. Then we could compare apples to oranges" on Twitter.

The final Orange Prize will be awarded at a ceremony in London on May 30. There are six books shortlisted for the award: "Foreign Bodies" by Cynthia Ozick, "The Forgotten Waltz" by Anne Enright, "Half-Blood Blues" by Esi Edugyan, "Painter of Silence" by Georgia Harding, "Song of Achilles" by Madeline Miller, and "State of Wonder" by Ann Patchett. The winner will recieve a statue and an award of more than $47,000.

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2012: Orange Prize shortlist

2011: Tea Obreht wins the Orange Prize

2010: Barbara Kingsolver wins the Orange Prize

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Judge Daisy Goodwin, Orange Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall at the 2010 Orange Prize ceremony in London. Credit: Alastair Grant / Associated Press

An interview with National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward won the 2011 National Book Award for the novel "Salvage the Bones," her second. The 35-year-old author, who gave a moving speech at the ceremony about why she writes what she writes, will be appearing at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this weekend on the panel "Fiction: The Dream Deferred" at 10:30 a.m. Sunday.

Ward has been a New Yorker, a Californian and a Michigander, but it's rural coastal Mississippi that she returns to, and that is at the center of her literary universe.

In Sunday's Times, Ward talks to Carolyn Kellogg about where she came from, and how she almost gave up writing to go to nursing school.

Below are additional excerpts from that conversation. We start in 2008, when Ward, after earning an master's degree at the University of Michigan, was commuting to New Orleans from Mississippi to work as an instructor, teaching mostly composition.

Jesmyn Ward: My first novel, "Where the Line Bleeds," was dead in the water. I almost gave up. I thought, "Maybe I should stop this." Because I was making –- instructors don't make anything; it's criminal how little they’re paid. I was really struggling. And I thought, "Maybe I should just quit all of this and do something that would give me a steady, higher-paying paycheck like nursing, that I know I could go back to school and do." And I was, I was really close to that.

But then I thought, "I'm just going to give it one more try, and apply for some fellowships, and see what happens." I applied for the Stegner fellowship and I applied for Provincetown, and at the same time I applied for the fellowships I was looking into nursing programs. During that winter, when I was waiting to hear from people, and that spring, that's when my novel was accepted for publication by a really small publishing house out of Chicago called Agate, which publishes a lot of African American literary fiction. And then I found out that I'd gotten a Stegner. It was amazing, like winning the lottery.

I lived in San Francisco and did the Stegner fellowship for two years, and it was amazing. From fall 2008 to spring 2010, I was there. When it came time for me to apply, again for jobs, in 2010 ... I began applying for jobs. Then I got the Grisham Writing Residency at the university of Ole Miss. Part of the residency is that they give you a fabulous large old house to live in, which is actually right down the street from Rowan Oak, Faulkner's house.

CK: I understand you're working on a memoir now?

JW: The memoir is about a particular time in my life, from 2000 to 2004, when five young black men from my community [the towns of Delisle and nearby Pass Christian] died in different ways. First was my brother, who was hit by a drunk driver and killed in October 2000. The second young man committed suicide ... he shot himself. The third young man was in a car accident; the car that he was in hit a train, and he was sitting on the passenger side and was trapped. The fourth young man was shot and his murder has never been solved -- somebody was waiting for him when he got home one night and shot him. The fifth young man died of a drug overdose -- he had a heart condition so the drugs made him have a heart attack. The book is asking why an epidemic like that -- of young black men dying, which is something I feel people associate with urban landscapes -- would happen in a place like the place where I'm from: Rural, southern, poor. I feel like it's very outside of the preconceived notions that people have of epidemics of young black men dying.

The [tentative] title, "The Men We Reaped," comes from a Harriet Tubman quote. ... I love it so much I hope that I am able to use it. I hope it's not an Internet quote:

We saw the lightning and that was the guns
And then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns
And then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling
And when we came to get in the crops it was dead men that we reaped.

Pulitzer Prize problems: Fiction jurors speak out

On Monday, when the Pulitzer Prizes were announced, the committee declined to choose a winner for fiction. It's the 11th time in the prize's history that has happened, but the last time was in 1977, so the lack of an award came as a shock.

Bestselling novelist and new independent bookstore owner Ann Patchett wrote in the New York Times, "As a novelist and the author of an eligible book, I do not love this. It's fine to lose to someone, and galling to lose to no one. Still, it is infinitely more galling to me as a reader, because there were so many good books published this year."

And the judges agree. The Pulitzer Prizes are selected in a two-tier system, in which judges recommend a selection of finalists to the board overseeing the prizes. The board then picks a winner -- or, as in the case of the 2012 fiction prize, picks none.

The three judges in fiction this year were Susan Larson, former books editor for the New Orleans Times-Picayune; Maureen Corrigan, a Georgetown University professor and a book critic on the public-radio show "Fresh Air," and novelist Michael Cunningham, himself a former winner.

The three books they had sent to the board as finalists were "Train Dreams" by Denis Johnson, "Swamplandia!" by Karen Russell, and "The Pale King" by David Foster Wallace.

While Cunningham has kept mum, Corrigan and Larson have spoken out.

Larson appeared on NPR, saying that she and the other judges were, "shocked ... angry ... and very disappointed."

In Thursday's Washington Post, Corrigan elaborated:

Like everyone else, we three jurors found out Monday that there would be no 2012 prize in fiction. That terrible news capped what was otherwise the greatest honor of my career as a book critic and professor of literature. ...

We three members of the Pulitzer jury were not charged with selecting the lengthiest, or the hoariest, or the most polished works of American fiction. We were not told to stick to the middlebrow, nor did we egg each other on to aim for the edgy. Our directive was to nominate "distinguished" works of fiction, published in book form in 2011 that, ideally, spoke to American themes. And 2011 saw a bounty of good novels. We unanimously agreed on our three nominees. In our collective judgment, these very different novels are three very distinguished works of fiction.

Corrigan suggested structural changes that might ameliorate the no-Pulitzer situation in the future.

Another idea would simply be to catch up with the recent books of fiction that have won in the last round of literary prizes, big and small: Jesmyn Ward's "Salvage the Bones," which won the National Book Award; the story collection "Binocular Vision" by Edith Pearlman, the National Book Critics Circle Award (disclosure: I'm on the board); Julian Barnes' "The Sense of An Ending," which won the Man Booker Prize; "The Buddha in the Attic" by Julie Otsuka, which won the PEN/Faulkner Prize; Steven Millhauser's "We Others: New & Selected Stories," which won the Story Prize; "Please Look After Mom," which won the Man Asian Literary Prize; or Patrick DeWitt's "The Sisters Brothers," which won the Morning News' Tournament of Books.

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2010: Pulitzer Prizes announced

No fiction award from Pulitzer Prize in 2012

2011: Jennifer Egan, Siddhartha Mukherjee and Kay Ryan win writing Pulitzer Prizes

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image credit: Medal from Pulitzer.org, collage by Carolyn Kellogg

Orange Prize shortlist includes Cynthia Ozick, Anne Enright

The Orange Prize announced the shortlist for its 2012 award Tuesday. Six writers remain in the running for the prize, which is awarded in London to a female author of fiction written in English. The winner will receive $48,000.

American writer Cynthia Ozick is in the running for her novel "Foreign Bodies." Ozick, who turns 84 today, is the most senior of the authors on the shortlist. 

The stiffest competition may come from Anne Enright, the Irish author of "The Forgotten Waltz." In 2007, Enright won the prestigious Man Booker Prize.

Or maybe Ann Patchett is the favorite. Patchett, an American who recently opened an independent bookstore in Tennessee, is a previous Orange Prize winner for her novel "Bel Canto." Her new novel, "State of Wonder," made the shortlist. Patchett blurbed "The Song of Achilles," the book by the third American in the running, Madeline Miller. It's Miller's debut novel.

Esi Edugyan is on her second novel; the Canadian author's contender, "Half-Blood Blues," was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

British writer Georgina Harding rounds out the shortlist with "Painter of Silence."

The Orange Prize is scheduled to be presented at a ceremony May 30.

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2011: Tea Obreht wins the Orange Prize

Barbara Kingsolver wins 2010 Orange Prize

Ann Patchett's lessons on writing, from Byliner

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Left photo: Cynthia Ozick in 1997. Credit: Associated Press

Right photo: Anne Enright. Credit: Jonthan Cape / EPA

 

No fiction award by Pulitzer Prize judges in 2012

The 2012 Pulitzer Prize for fiction went to no one, it was announced Monday. The Pulitzer judges did reveal that three books had been named finalists, but declined to award one the prize.

The three finalists were "Train Dreams" by Denis Johnson, "Swamplandia!" by Karen Russell and "The Pale King" by the late David Foster Wallace.

In deciding the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, a committee of readers, which changes annually, recommends a small slate of titles to a panel of judges, who choose the winner.

"The three books were fully considered, but in the end, nonemustered the mandatory majority for granting a prize, so no prize was awarded," said Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, declining to go into further detail. "This is the 11th time this has happened in the fiction category; the last time was 1977. It's unusual, but it does occur."

On occasion, the decision not to award the fiction prize has been marked by controversy. In 1941, the committee's recommendation of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway was deemed offensive by the president of Columbia University, and no award was given.

Other book prizes were awarded by the committee. The Pulitzer for biography went to John Lewis Gaddis for "George F. Kennan: An American Life"; the prize for history went to "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention" by Manning Marable; the Pulitzer for general nonfiction went to "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern" by Stephen Greenblatt; and the award for poetry went to Tracy K. Smith for "Life on Mars."

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2011: Jennifer Egan, Siddhartha Mukherjee and Kay Ryan win writing Pulitzer Prizes

Guggenheim announces 2012 fellows

2010: Pulitzer Prizes announced

— Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: David Foster Wallace. The author killed himself in 2008. Credit: Gary Hannaburger

Guggenheim announces 2012 fellows

The Guggenheim Foundation announced its 2012 fellows Thursday. The 181 fellows include scientists, scholars, composers, visual artists and writers of many stripes.

There are seven fellows in fiction. Donald Ray Pollock (above left), began writing after working in a paper mill for 32 years; his 2011 novel "The Devil All the Time" tells a brutal story of faith and betrayal in midcentury Ohio. Arthur Phillips, author of "The Tragedy of Arthur," was one of the L.A. Times' 2011 faces to watch in literature. Other fiction fellows include Lydia Millet (a face to watch in 2008), John Dufresne, Barbara Gowdy, Lance Olsen and John Wray.

Thirteen writers have been named fellows in general nonfiction, including Sarah Manguso (above right), whose most recent book is "The Guardians: An Elegy." Notably, graphic novelist Alison Bechdel will receive a nonfiction fellowship. The other nonfiction fellows are Eliza Griswold, James Kaplan, Peter Maass, Eileen Myles, Judith Pascoe, Lia Purpura, Lauren Redniss, Joan Richardson, Elizabeth D. Samet, Richard Snow and Benjamin Taylor.

Two of the three biography winners have announced what they are currently working on: Ruth Franklin is writing a biography of writer Shirley Jackson, and Terry Teachout is at work on a biography of Duke Ellington. The third biography fellow is David J. Hancock.

Ten fellows have been named in poetry:  Katharine Coles, Kwame Dawes, Timothy Donnelly, Kathleen Graber, Pablo Medina, Joseph Millar, Jim Moore, Elizabeth Willis, Christian Wiman and C. Dale Young.

The director of USC's Masters of Professional Writing program, Brighde Mullins, is a fellow in drama.

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National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medals announced

$100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award goes to Timothy Donnelly

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photos: Donald Ray Pollock (left) and Sarah Manguso. Credits: Patsy Pollock / Doubleday (left) and Andy Ryan /FSG

From Best Translated Book Awards: Poetry, fiction shortlists

The shortlist of nominees for Best Translated Book Awards was announced late Tuesday in Rochester, N.Y., and consists of six books of poetry and 10 books of fiction.

In February, BTBA announced its fiction longlist; this is the first list of poetry books in the running for this year's award. The fiction finalists hail from six countries: three from France, two each from Poland and Spain, and one each from Hungary, Italy and Portugal.

The poetry finalists are more far-flung. There are two collections published originally in German, and one each in French, Russian, Japanese and Arabic. The author of the winning book in each category -- poetry and fiction -- will receive $5,000. And the work's translator will, too.

Founded in 2007, the Best Translated Book Awards are presented in Manhattan as part of the PEN World Voices Festival. This year's ceremony will be on May 4.

The complete list of 16 shortlisted titles appears after the jump.

Los Angeles Magazine nominated for two National Magazine Awards

The American Society of Magazine Editors on Tuesday announced finalists for the Ellies, its annual awards for excellence. Los Angeles Magazine is a finalist in two categories, one of 26 multiple nominees.

Mike Kessler's September story, "What Happened to Mitrice Richardson?" is a finalist in the reporting category. Richardson, pictured above, was missing for more than a year after disappearing in Malibu. Kessler's story begins, "A recent college graduate, she was jailed briefly for trying to skip out on her dinner tab in Malibu, then freed in the middle of the night in a neighborhood far from home. She had no car, no ride, no phone, and no money. When she disappeared, it raised a flurry of questions about how the sheriff’s department handled her case. The discovery of her body a year later only raised more."

The New Yorker has two nominees in the category: "Getting Bin Laden" by Nicholas Schmidle and Lawrence Wright's "The Apostate," about film director Mike Figgis' involvement with, and departure from, Scientology. The other reporting nominees are "Our Man in Kandahar" by Matthieu Aikens in the Atlantic and "Echoes From a Distant Battlefield" by Mark Bowden in Vanity Fair.

The other Los Angeles Magazine finalist is novelist Steve Erickson, who serves as the publication's film critic. Erickson's recent criticism includes his own alternate Oscars and a year-end summary that focuses on films by Lars von Trier, Jeff Nichols and Terrence Malick. In the columns/commentary category, Erickson's competition is the Atlantic's James Parker, Time's Joel Stein, Bill Heavey in Field & Stream and Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair.

Another novelist, Jonathan Franzen, earned a nomination for the story "Ambition" published in McSweeney's. That's in the fiction category, where McSweeney's earned another nomination as well, for "The Northeast Kingdom" by Nathaniel Rich. Other nominees are Karen Russell for "The Hox River Window" in Zoetrope, Maggie Shipstead for "La Moretta" in the Virginia Quarterly Review and "Scars" by Sarah Turcotte in the Atlantic.

A complete list of the National Magazine Award nominees is online. The Ellies will be awarded at a ceremony in New York on May 3.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Photos of Mitrice Richardson are displayed during the search for the missing woman. Credit: Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times