Hilary Mantel Made a Dame, Mark Twain Plaque Returned, and More

by
Staff
2.9.15

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:

Bestselling British author Hilary Mantel, whose novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were both awarded the Man Booker Prize, has been made a Dame. Prince Charles honored the novelist for her services to literature in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace on Friday. (Los Angeles Times)

The eight finalists for the 2015 Folio Prize for fiction have been announced, and include Ben Lerner’s 10:04, Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows, and Ali Smith’s How to Be Both. Sponsored by the London-based Folio Society, the annual award recognizes “the best English-language fiction from around the world, regardless of form, genre, or the author’s country of origin.” The complete shortlist can be found on the Folio Prize website, and the winner of the £40,000 award will be announced March 23.

South African novelist and playwright André Brink, an outspoken critic of apartheid, died Friday. Brink wrote over twenty novels in his lifetime, including the bestselling 1979 novel A Dry White Season. He was seventy-nine. (Telegraph)

In more sad news, Algerian novelist Assia Djebar passed away Saturday at age seventy-eight. “Her novels and poems boldly face the challenges and struggles she knew as a feminist living under patriarchy and an intellectual living under colonialism and its aftermath,” stated Djebar’s American publisher Seven Stories Press. (Guardian)

The bronze plaque that was stolen from Mark Twain’s grave in Elmira, New York, in late December has been recovered “in good condition,” according to the Elmira Police Department. More details have yet to be disclosed, but Melville House digital media director Alex Shepard insists that he did not rob Mark Twain’s grave.

“Today’s social media landscape confronts contemporary authors with a qualitatively different opportunity to confront their public selves.” In an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Matthew Kirschenbaum examines how our digitally-saturated culture shapes and characterizes contemporary authors.

Speaking of digital saturation, listen to a podcast in which Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Paul Muldoon and writer Nicholas Carr discuss the “perils of automation” and how technology is changing the way we experience poetry. (Guardian)