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:
The longlist for the £50,000 Man Booker International Prize has been announced. The prize, which was formerly given biennially to a fiction writer for a body of work, merged this year with the Independent’s Foreign Fiction Prize to become an annual award given for a single work of fiction translated into English and published in the previous year. The longlist, which features writers from twelve different countries, includes Italian writer Elena Ferrante for The Story of the Lost Child, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk for A Strangeness in My Mind, and Japanese writer Kenzaburō Ōe for Death by Water.
In other award news, Michael Lindgren surveys this year’s finalists for the National Book Critic Circle’s criticism prize, which include Colm Tóibín, Maggie Nelson, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The winner will be announced next Thursday in New York City. (Washington Post)
Meanwhile, the twelfth annual Tournament of Books kicked off yesterday, with Maria Bustillos choosing between Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies and Zachary Thomas Dodson’s Bats of the Republic. Brad Listi judged today’s matchup between Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and Fran Ross’s Oreo. (Morning News)
“Aren’t the themes of immigrant literature—estrangement, homelessness, fractured identities—the stuff of all modern literature, if not life?” At the New York Times, Parul Sehgal dissects the label “immigrant fiction.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg will publish her first book since joining the Supreme Court in 1993. The book, My Own Words, will be comprised of a selection of writings and speeches by Ginsburg and will be published by Simon & Schuster in January 2017.
Heather Wolfe, a manuscript curator and archivist at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., is shedding new light on Shakespeare scholarship with her project to transcribe and digitize hundreds of documents about the playwright—as well as, with her rare ability to read secretary hand, the cursive used in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. (Wall Street Journal)
Claire Kirch interviews Lisa Lucas—who will step into her role as the executive director of the National Book Foundation next Monday—about reaching a broader readership, advocating for diversity in the literary world, and the perception that the publishing industry is too focused on New York City. (Publishers Weekly)
Elisa Gabbert considers the politics behind dictionaries, and the difficulties of removing sexist biases in word definitions. (Smart Set)
