Poets & Writers Blogs

The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, which offers a prize of fifteen thousand dollars, was announced yesterday.

MacArthur "Genius" Fellow Deborah Eisenberg received the honor, for which she will be feted at a ceremony in May, for The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Picador). The four other finalists, including recent National Book Critics Circle Award winner Jennifer Egan, will receive five thousand dollars each.

In other fiction news, the longlist for the Orange Prize, given for a novel by a woman writer published in the United Kingdom during the previous year, was announced today. Among this year's standout authors are nine debut novelists, including much-celebrated Téa Obrecht for The Tiger's Wife (Random House) and Karen Russell—whobroke out onto the literary scene in 2006 with the story collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (Knopf)—for Swamplandia! (Knopf). Samantha Hunt, whose The Seas appeared in the United Kingdom six years after it debuted in the United States, is also a contender for the thirty-thousand-pound prize (approximately forty-eight thousand dollars).

The finalists, with their U.K. publishers noted, are:
Lyrics Alley by Leila Aboulela (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch (Canongate)
Room by Emma Donoghue (Picador)
The Pleasure Seekers by Tishani Doshi (Bloomsbury)
Whatever You Love by Louise Doughty (Faber and Faber)
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Corsair)
The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna (Bloomsbury)
The London Train by Tessa Hadley (Jonathan Cape)
Grace Williams Says it Loud by Emma Henderson (Sceptre)
The Seas by Samantha Hunt (Corsair)
The Birth of Love by Joanna Kavenna (Faber and Faber)
Great House by Nicole Krauss (Viking)
The Road to Wanting by Wendy Law-Yone (Chatto & Windus)
The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer (Viking)
Repeat it Today with Tears by Anne Peile (Serpent's Tail)
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (Chatto & Windus)
The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives by Lola Shoneyin (Serpent's Tail)
The Swimmer by Roma Tearne (Harper Press)
Annabel by Kathleen Winter (Jonathan Cape)

"There is a scope to this list," says one judge, Susanna Reid. "If anyone has a preconception about what a woman writes about, or what a woman's novel is, I think that this will blow it away. These novels cross continents, cross generations, cross decades, and there is no subject that these writers are not willing to tackle."

The Orange Prize winner will be announced on June 8.

Abe's Penny, a "micro-magazine" that presents stories and poems serialized on postcards along with images, is looking for poems to accompany four series of photographs it will present in a Miami exhibition this April. The magazine will accept entries live at the New World School of the Arts' ArtSeen gallery on April 2, opening night of its exhibition featuring works by photographers Robby Campbell, Francie Bishop Good, Lee Materazzi, and Samantha Salzinger (and, incidentally, poetry readings by Gabby Calvocoressi and Denise Duhamel).

Writers will also have to opportunity to submit work during poetry and music events promoting the exhibition's run, which ends on April 26. (The show is held in conjunction with the new, monthlong, O, Miami literary festival, and information about all events is available on the festival Web site.) At the end of April, Abe's Penny will select one collaboration to publish as an issue of its magazine, which will be published piece-by-piece over the course of four weeks. 

Writers visiting the gallery are invited to pen their poetry in "utopian but functional" workspaces created by New World School students. In order to offer writers more time to interact with the photography, the gallery will open to poets one hour prior to each scheduled event. There is no fee to submit poems, and the events are free and open to the public.

The finalists for this year's PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, which carries a prize of fifteen thousand dollars, were announced today. The shortlisted authors are Jennifer Egan for her novel A Visit From the Goon Squad (Knopf), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; MacArthur "Genius" Fellow Deborah Eisenberg for The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Picador); Jaimy Gordon for her National Book Award-winning novel Lord of Misrule (McPherson); Eric Puchner for his novel Model Home (Scribner); and Brad Watson for his story collection Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives (Norton).

The titles were selected by authors Laura Furman, William Kittredge, and Helena Maria Viramontes from among 320 novels and short story collections published in 2010 by more than 125 publishers.

How does a judge manage to winnow all those entries? "There's a little sound a hardback book makes when it's first opened, not exactly a squeak but almost, and that sound became familiar," says Furman. "When I felt unsure, groggy, or worst, compromising, my fellow judges were there—as were the best of the books—to remind me to keep to the strictest of standards, those of my heart, instinct, and intelligence."

The winner of the thirty-first annual award will be announced during a ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. on May 7.

In the video below, Egan reads from her nominated book at New York City's Franklin Park Reading Series.

The Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice will once again award ten-thousand-dollar grants to a poet and a fiction writer, but with a deadline falling a few months earlier than last year's. Entries for the 2011 awards, given to lesbian writers for work with lesbian content, will be due by the end of the business day on March 22.

Two finalists in each genre will receive one thousand dollars each and six honorable mentions will be awarded one hundred dollars each, with at least one of the grants given to a writer west of the Mississippi. A panel of distinguished lesbian writers, which has in the past been populated by writers such as Sharon Bridgforth, Staceyanne Chin, Kristen Hogan, Achy Obejas, and Pamela Sneed, will select the grantees.

For guidelines on what to submit and access to Astraea's online submission system (their preferred mode of entry), visit the foundation's Web site.

In the video below, 2010 poetry winner Lenelle Moïse reads a poem inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat over a montage of his paintings.

We asked Ryan Fischer-Harbage of The Fischer-Harbage Agency, Inc., whose client list includes Ethan Brown, Courtney Eldridge, Bill Eppridge, Aliya King, Amy Sullivan, and Jackson Taylor, to fill us in on his book proposal writing class at Mediabistro.com.

Do most of your Mediabistro students have a book they’ve started when they sign up for your class?
Most people have an idea, and in addition to the workshop, I also teach an advanced class where people can only sign up if they have a rough idea of a book, or several ideas. I think these classes are most effective for people who are already into something.

Have most of your students received their MFA?
The thing I like about Mediabistro is that they attract working writers so it’s a wide mix of people. Right now I have a class of ten. Three of them have their MFAs and some of them are professionals in other things—there’s even a trainer, and then the others are journalists.

What does a book proposal look like?
So here’s the deal. When you’re selling a nonfiction book you don’t have to write the whole book. You only have to write a proposal. A TV writer writes a spec script, a musician puts together a demo tape, and whether you’re writing a memoir or a health and wellness title or narrative nonfiction, you write a book proposal. Generally speaking, a proposal is forty-five to seventy-five pages.

What is the standard template for a book proposal?
There are five or six components, perhaps the most important of which is the sample material from the book. In eight weeks, if my students do their homework, which probably 75 percent of the time they do, people have a working first draft of their proposal by the end of the course.

What is the success rate for your students getting their book sold?
It’s my experience that in every workshop, whether it’s a regular nonfiction book proposal workshop or an advanced workshop, at least one student from every group sells their book within ninety days of the class. And there are more that come later, but I usually hear about the ones right after the class.

I’m guessing that because you’re an agent you know what other agents are looking for?
I don’t necessarily tell people where to pitch their proposals. I’m more concerned with the actual craft than with the business side of things.

What are your top five tips when pitching a book proposal?
One: The big publishers won’t consider a proposal unless it’s from an agent. Obviously some of the small presses and university presses don’t care, but I always advise people to start at the top. You know, if you have the choice of Random House paying you real money for your book and getting copies in every store in the country, or a university press paying you nothing and getting your book on Amazon and a couple local bookstores, I think, Why not start at the top? Writers should be paid.

Two: Writers need to know to whom they’re pitching, which means having a real familiarity with what an agent does. Writers send agents a query letter, which is a one-page summary of their book, and it also includes a brief bio of the writer. I think this letter should be sent to agents that the writer’s research suggests would be interested in their book. For example, when I get a query letter that says, “Dear Agent,” and I see that fifty or seventy-five of my colleagues are cc’d on the e-mail, I just delete it. I don’t even read it. The writer put no time into sending it to me, and I feel no obligation into putting time into reading it. When someone sends me a letter that shows the writer is familiar with my work, I can’t just delete it because I feel and see that they’ve put a little bit of time into sending it to me, and I owe them time to read it.

Three: People often send their query letters out before their proposal is finished, and if I write back and say, “Great, I’d love to read it,” and I get a response like, “Oh, well, it’s going to be ready in six months, and I’ll send it to you,” I feel annoyed. I could get hit by a bus in the next six months. I think it’s much more professional to have the proposal finished and when someone says they’d like to read it—boom, you send it.

Four: The mistake I see most frequently is people don’t put enough time into their work. They rush things and they don’t engage in a meaningful editorial process of careful revision. Agents are a little more forgiving than editors. Agents will look at something more than once. We’re used to seeing things that are less developed, and a good agent will help develop a writer a bit, but the work has got to be done. We don’t talk about competition in this business, but it’s extremely competitive.

Five: Work finds its place. The market forces work pretty well—not perfectly, and certainly a lot of great work goes undiscovered, but when someone really focuses on his or her craft and does the footwork, whatever’s supposed to happen generally does.

Fischer-Harbage accepts queries via e-mail: ryan@fischerharbage.com. Based on a high volume of submissions, his only request is patience.

The shortlist for the fourth annual Man Asian Literary Prize was announced yesterday, marking the first time the relatively new prize has called out titles already published in English. According to an article on yesterday's Wall Street Journal arts blog, the shift took place after organizers found the prize wasn't quite fulfilling its original objective: to seek out and distinguish unknown writers.

The old prize model accepted from Asian writers novel manuscripts that remained unpublished in English, but, despite the proposed aim of the award, did not stipulate at what stage in their careers eligible writers should be. The inaugural winner, selected from more than two hundred and fifty submissions, was Jiang Rong for Wolf Totem, which had already been published in Chinese and sold millions of copies. In 2009, Su Tong, well known for his novel Raise the Red Lantern, won for The Boat to Redemption. Only the 2008 winner, Filipino American writer Miguel Syjuco, was recognized for what would become his debut novel, Ilustrado (and even he had received the prestigious Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature for the same manuscript in the Philippines).

“As we sat down and thought about it, we came to realize that, in fact, the Man Booker [Prize] format of dealing with published novels is a lot better,” David Parker, chairman of the Man Asian Literary Prize, told the Wall Street Journal, referring to the Man Asian Prize's long-running British Commonwealth counterpart. He went on to say that the Booker "is a focus of a conversation about literature that occurs every year. It’s not just about writers and publishers. It’s about readers as well. It’s about the whole culture getting involved in literature.”

This year's conversation-starters are:
Three Sisters (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) by Bi Feiyu of China
Serious Men (Norton) by Manu Joseph of India
The Thing About Thugs (HarperCollins) by Tabish Khair of India
The Changeling (Grove Press) by Kenzaburo Oe of Japan
Hotel Iris (Picador) by Yoko Ogawa of Japan

The winner of the thirty-thousand-dollar prize will be announced in Hong Kong on March 17.

The Man Booker Prize has created another one-off award. Intended to celebrate the life's work of the late Beryl Bainbridge, who had been a finalist for the prestigious British award five times but never won, the Best of Beryl prize will call out the most Booker-worthy of her shortlisted titles, as determined by public vote.

Voters can choose between Bainbridge's novels Master Georgie (1998), Every Man for Himself (1996), An Awfully Big Adventure (1990), the Guardian Fiction Award–winning The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), and  The Dressmaker (1973). (Incidentally, her final novel, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, forthcoming in June from Little, Brown, is ineligible for a posthumous Booker nomination—only living writers are considered for the honor.) The Best of Beryl title will be announced in April.

"Beryl did want to win the Booker very much despite her protests to the contrary," says Bainbridge's daughter, Jojo Davies. "We are glad she is finally able to become the bride, no longer the bridesmaid."

Meanwhile, the Guardian's Michael Holroyd takes a more skeptical stance on what exactly the award is celebrating.

In the video below, BBC News takes a look back at the life of Bainbridge at the time of her death last July.