Kiran Desai wins another award
Topic: Writers in the News
Yahoo.com

Desai's 'Inheritance' wins fiction prize
By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National WriterFri Mar 9, 7:32 AM ET

Kiran Desai's "The Inheritance of Loss," a narrative of global discovery and displacement that has already won the Man Booker Prize, received another literary honor Thursday night: the National Book Critics Circle fiction award.

"To be claimed by the place in which you live means so much," said Desai, a native of India who now lives in New York.

The daughter of author Anita Desai, she worried about the "perverse" luck of her book, although she was clearly prepared to win, reciting a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, "The Boast of Quietness," which reads, in part, "More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude."

Six prizes and two honorary awards were handed out at the 33rd annual critics award ceremony. Simon Schama's "Rough Crossings," a history of slaves who fought with the British during the Revolutionary War, won for general nonfiction. Julie Phillips' was the biography winner for "James Tiptree, Jr.," the pen name for science fiction author Alice B. Sheldon.

Phillips, who took 10 years to complete her book, accepted the award by quoting Sheldon, who committed suicide in 1987: "Life is fair. Some people have talent; other people get prizes."

Daniel Mendelsohn's "The Lost," a memoir of six family members lost in the Holocaust, won for autobiography. Troy Jollimore's "Tom Thomson in Purgatory," a debut collection, was a surprise for poetry, chosen over such celebrated finalists as W.D. Snodgrass, Frederick Seidel and the late Miltos Sachtouris.

"I'm stunned, and I may not be the only one," said Jollimore, who smiled and shook his head in disbelief when he heard his name announced as the winner.

The criticism prize went to Lawrence Weschler's "Everything That Rises," which beat out, among others, Bruce Bawer's controversial "While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within," a book that even members of the NBCC have called racist and anti-Muslim.

Steven G. Kellman, whose work has appeared in The Texas Observer, The Georgia Review and other publications, won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Longtime critic John Leonard, who has written for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and The Nation among others, won the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award.

Hundreds gathered at the New School's Tishman Auditorium in downtown Manhattan at a time when critics have been reminded yet again of their precarious status, with the Los Angeles Times expected soon to cut its Sunday review section and combine it with the Saturday opinion pages, a day of lower circulation.

In accepting his honorary award, Leonard joked about appearing before "a roomful of people so innocent of the profit motive." The head of the book critics circle, John Freeman, began the evening by noting the trend of shrinking review coverage and reminding the audience — who needed little reminding — that criticism was a kind of "Ellis Island" for culture, a passageway for the best writing.

The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, has nearly 500 members. There are no cash prizes, but a great deal of prestige. A solid majority of nominees showed up, including such high-profile writers as novelists Richard Ford and Dave Eggers and historian Taylor Branch.

___

On the Net:

http://www.bookcritics.org

(Simon Schama's book won the nonfiction prize, not the fiction prize. Kellman's first name, Steven, was misspelled in previous story.)

Copyright ? 2007

Get The Story Down
Topic: Writers in the News
Friday 5:45pm 9March07

I was going through my emails and came across this from
Terry Whalin...

Get The Story Down

By W. Terry Whalin

Over the last fifteen plus years, I've had many opportunities to interview book authors and talk with them about how they practice their craft. Whether fiction or nonfiction, I've always been interested in how they start the process.

Gilbert Morris, a prolific novelist, told me about his unusual technique. He creates an outline of his story and knows the background on his characters. Then he sits quietly at his desk with a tape recorder and orally records his novel. The tapes are transcribed and he takes this oral storytelling as the foundation to begin his rewriting process. Gil Morris told me about Sidney Sheldon, the bestselling author who also uses this technique. Yesterday at the age of 89, Sheldon died. His initial technique to start his writing process was tucked into the Associated Press story: "Unlike other novelists who toiled over typewriters or computers, he dictated 50 pages a day to a secretary or a tape machine. He corrected the pages the following day, continuing the routine until he had 1,200 to 1,500 pages. ''Then I do a complete rewrite-- 12 to 15 times,'' he said. ''I spend a whole year rewriting.'' Several of his novels became television miniseries, often with the author as producer."

Bebe Moore Campbell
Topic: Writers in the News
Saturday 3Mar07 8:19am

Once again it was an awards show (NAACP awards) that told me that someone passed away. Black american writer, Bebe Moore Campbell. A beautiful writer that never got the acclaim that Terri Macmillan received. Her writing quality was far more deserving. Very very sad...
EY

Bebe Moore Campbell

November 28, 2006

Bebe Moore Campbell, Novelist of Black Lives, Dies at 56
By MARGALIT FOX


Bebe Moore Campbell, a best-selling novelist known for her empathetic treatment of the difficult, intertwined and occasionally surprising relationship between the races, died yesterday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 56.

The cause was complications of brain cancer, said Linda Wharton-Boyd, a longtime friend.

Along with writers like Terry McMillan, Ms. Campbell was part of the first wave of black novelists who made the lives of upwardly mobile black people a routine subject for popular fiction. Straddling the divide between literary and mass-market novels, Ms. Campbell’s work explored not only the turbulent dance between blacks and whites but also the equally fraught relationship between men and women.

Throughout her work, Ms. Campbell sought to counter prevailing stereotypes of black people as socially and economically marginal. Though critics occasionally faulted her characters as two-dimensional, her novels were known for their crossover appeal, read by blacks and whites alike.

Often called on by the news media to discuss race relations, Ms. Campbell was for years a familiar presence on television and radio. With the publication of her most recent novel, “72 Hour Hold” (Knopf, 2005), she also became a visible spokeswoman on mental-health issues. The novel, about bipolar disorder, was inspired by the experience of a family member, Ms. Campbell said.

Originally a schoolteacher and later a journalist, Ms. Campbell made her mark as a writer of fiction with her first novel, “Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine” (Putnam), published in 1992. Rooted in the story of Emmett Till, the book tells of a black Chicago youth killed by a white man in Mississippi in 1955. After the murderer is acquitted at trial, the narrative follows his increasing dissolution.

“I wanted to give racism a face,” Ms. Campbell said in an interview with The New York Times Book Review in 1992. “African-Americans know about racism, but I don’t think we really know the causes. I decided it’s first of all a family problem.”

Reviewing the novel in The Book Review, Clyde Edgerton wrote: “By showing lives lived, and not explaining ideas, Ms. Campbell does what good storytellers do — she puts in by leaving out.”

Ms. Campbell’s other novels, all published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, are “Brothers and Sisters” (1994), written in the wake of the Los Angeles riots of 1992; “Singing in the Comeback Choir” (1998), about a black television producer feeling cut off from her roots; and “What You Owe Me” (2001), about the friendship between two women, one African-American, the other a Jewish Holocaust survivor, in the 1940’s.

Elizabeth Bebe Moore was born in Philadelphia on Feb. 18, 1950, to parents who divorced when she was very young. Bebe spent each school year in Philadelphia with her mother, grandmother and aunt — strong, upright women she collectively called “the Bosoms” — who set her on a course of study, discipline and staunch middle-class respectability.

She spent summers in North Carolina with her father, who had been paralyzed in an automobile accident. There, she was enveloped in a heady world of beer, laughter and cigar smoke. She documented her contrasting lives in her memoir, “Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad” (Putnam, 1989).

After earning a bachelor’s degree in elementary education from the University of Pittsburgh in 1971, Ms. Campbell taught school in Atlanta for several years before embarking on a career as a freelance journalist. Her first book was a work of nonfiction, “Successful Women, Angry Men: Backlash in the Two-Career Marriage” (Random House, 1986).

She also wrote two picture books for children, “Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry” (Putnam, 2003; illustrated by E. B. Lewis); and “Stompin’ at the Savoy” (Philomel, 2006; illustrated by Richard Yarde).

Ms. Campbell’s first marriage, to Tiko Campbell, ended in divorce. She is survived by her husband, Ellis Gordon Jr., whom she married in 1984; her mother, Doris Moore of Los Angeles; a daughter from her first marriage, Maia Campbell of Los Angeles; a stepson, Ellis Gordon III of Mitchellville, Md.; and two grandchildren.

Despite the subject matter of her books, Ms. Campbell expressed hope about the future of American race relations. In an interview with The New York Times in 1995, she described her motivation for writing “Brothers and Sisters,” the story of the friendship between a black banker and her white colleague.

“It was my attempt to bridge a racial gap,” Ms. Campbell said. “That’s the story that never gets told: how many of us really like each other, respect each other.”


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Philip Roth
Topic: Writers in the News
Yahoo article

Roth wins PEN/Faulkner literary award
Mon Feb 26, 11:44 AM ET

Philip Roth has won yet another literary prize, this time the PEN/Faulkner award for "Everyman," his short, bleak novel about illness and mortality.

"It's such a slim volume," PEN/Faulkner judge Debra Magpie Earling said Monday in a statement, "and the book haunts me, its simplicity and brutishness, the unflinching look at life. Roth never looks away, never trivializes, never shrugs. He manages to wrestle with grief, the immensity of losing self."

The runners-up were Charles D'Ambrosio's "The Dead Fish Museum," Deborah Eisenberg's "Twilight of the Superheroes," Amy Hempel's "The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel" and Edward P. Jones' "All Aunt Hagar's Children."

Roth, who will receive $15,000, is the first three-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner, having received it in 1994 for "Operation Shylock" and in 2001 for "The Human Stain." The PEN/Faulkner Award was founded in 1980.

Copyright ? 2007 The Associated Press.

Stef Penney
Topic: Writers in the News
It makes me laugh that the focus on Stef Penney is that she wrote a novel based in the Canadian wilderness when she has never been to Canada. I saw another article on her today that went on and on about it. When did we become so focused on a person being there? The whole point of fiction is that it's from our imagination. If I'm writing an historical novel I can't go to whatever historical period I'm writing about. If I can't go there I can't write about it? If I'm not a man, I can't have male characters? It's bizarre to me.
EY

Cured agoraphobic lands top UK literary prize
By Paul MajendieWed Feb 7, 6:21 PM ET

Debut novelist Stef Penney, once an agoraphobic too terrified to travel, landed one of Britain's top literary awards on Wednesday for a haunting novel about the Canadian wilderness she has never visited.

Penney, a screenwriter who now has her fear of open spaces under control, landed the Costa Award for "The Tenderness of Wolves," which literary critics hailed as an astonishingly assured debut.

Utterly astounded by her surprise win, Penney told reporters afterwards: "I am still shaking. I am supposed to be a writer but I don't know how to describe that."

Penney said of her agoraphobia: "It isn't a distant memory. I don't think it ever goes away completely. I can now fly which is great."

Asked what message she had to offer to agoraphobics after her personal journey of the imagination, she said: "Don't give up. It might take a long time, you might not know how you are going to get over it, but you can."

Comedy writer and director Armando Iannucci, who chaired the judges, said "Within 50 pages, I was completely in love with it."

The 37-year-old British writer took the coveted award after a close fought tussle with novelist William Boyd for his spy drama "Restless" and Brian Thompson for his quirky wartime autobiography "Keeping Mum," Iannucci said.

It was only the fourth time that a debut novelist had landed the book of the year award since 1985.

Agoraphobia often confines sufferers to their homes. Penney conquered hers after a two-and-a-half-year battle before going out to research the book in the British Library in London.

She told Reuters at the ceremony: "I was fascinated about Canada because I couldn't go there."

"It made me want to armchair travel," she said. "Something did eventually cure me. Whether it was part of that, I don't know but perhaps it was."

"The more I researched, the more fascinated I got and the bigger the canvas got," she said of the novel that starts with a brutal murder and the sudden disappearance of a teenage boy in a remote corner of 1860s northern Ontario.

The Costa, formerly known as the Whitbread, is split into five categories -- for best novel, first novel, poetry, children's book and biography -- with 5,000 pounds ($9,856) going to each winner and 25,000 pounds to the overall winner.

Poets Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney and children's writer Philip Pullman are among previous book of the year winners.

The prize, selected this year from a record 580 entries, is designed to reward the most enjoyable read of last year, whereas winners of the prestigious Booker Prize are picked above all for their literary prowess.

Copyright ? 2007 Reuters