Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:
Award-winning London–based poet and rapper Kate Tempest has turned her hit debut album, Everybody Down, into a novel called The Bricks That Built the Houses. At NPR, Tempest talks about how the idea for the story came to her, the differences and challenges between creating stories through music and fiction, and the power of reading her work out loud.
Over at Signature, Justin Webster, director of the new Gabriel García Márquez documentary Gabo, discusses his choice of the fiction writer as the film’s subject, as well as the revelations he discovered while making the documentary, and what new facts Márquez fans will learn from the film.
Are writers a bit psycho? A psychological research study conducted in the Philippines found that certain psychopathic personality traits were positively correlated with levels of creative achievement. (Electric Literature)
The Poetry Foundation announced today that Chicago poet Ed Roberson has received the 2016 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. The annual $100,000 prize honors a U.S. poet for a body of work meriting extraordinary recognition.
Mark Haddon, author of the best-selling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, talks about his process, as well as writing without reverence in his new short story collection, The Pier Falls, which was released yesterday by Doubleday. “I realized that if you’re going to write about groups of people or places and you’ve got a choice between bringing them to life with reverence or destroying them with the same amount of detail, then why not go for destroying? Because ultimately, there is no narrative without death. It’s finitude which drives stories along. You get nothing on the page if you write about happiness.” (Longreads)
In an interview at BOMB, Brazilian fiction writer Alexandre Vidal Porto talks about the future of Brazilian fiction, the irrelevance of gender identity, and his second novel, Sergio Y.
Poet Craig Morgan Teicher writes at Publishers Weekly about the state of the American creative writing community, addressing the anger and concern about institutional racism expressed at this year’s AWP conference, and the steps that need to be taken to make the writing community more inclusive.
