Archive for the ‘prize’ Category
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
Today the winners of the Governor General’s Literary Awards were announced, including Kate Pullinger’s The Mistress of Nothing for the Fiction award and David Zieroth’s The Fly in Autumn for Poetry. You can check out the winners and shortlist on our Governor General’s Awards page.
In other GG’s news we just conducted an interview with John. H. Meier who is the curator of the finest collection of Governor General Award for Fiction winners in the world, which he will be exhibiting around Canada at Universities and festivals. He’s also offered some insight into the cream of the crop for past GG winners. You can read the full interview here
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Thursday, October 8th, 2009
The Nobel Prize for Literature has once again been awarded to an author who is not American. Herta Müller, the Romanian-born writer and poet who is now a German citizen, has been awarded the prize for her work, much of which concerns the harsh life in Romania under the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Her first published book was a collection of short stories, Niederungen. It was censored by the government for being critical of the Ceausescu regime. The University of Nebraska Press published the book as Nadirs in 1999.
Her second published work, in 1984, was called Drückender Tango, the translations are called Oppressive Tango. Muller moved to West Germany in 1987 and she currently lives in Berlin.
A few other options for English readers include
The Passport (1989)
Traveling on One Leg (1992)
The Land of Green Plums (1996)
Traveling on One Leg (1998)
The Appointment (2001)
Children of Ceausescu (2002)
There is a very obscure academic work about Herta Muller by Brigid Haines. The book, called Herta Muller, contains 10 previously unpublished short texts by Muller with an interview and a biography. Six essays by British and German academics interpret her key texts in detail and assess vital aspects of Muller’s work.
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Monday, August 31st, 2009
Twice is enough for two-time Giller Prize winner Alice Munro.
Despite it meaning that she’ll have less free publicity for her latest book Too Much Happiness, Munro insisted that she be taken out of the running so that other writers would have a fighting chance.
McClelland and Stewart publisher Douglas Gibson said, “From a publisher’s point of view it’s too bad but it’s absolutely understandable and this is Alice Munro, she’s a genuinely nice person.”
Giller organizers were a bit disappointed as there was a chance that Munro would be battling Margaret Atwood for the award.
With a $50,000 prize for the winner and $5,000 prizes for each of the finalists, the Giller Prize is Canada’s most lucrative literary award.
Munro won the Giller in 1998 for The Love of a Good Woman and again in 2004 for Runaway. She also won the Man Booker International Award earlier this year.
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Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
The National Book Awards have acclaimed the finest writing in American literature for decades. To celebrate the 60th anniversary of these awards, the National Book Foundation has today launched a campaign to select the best book from the long list of fiction winners.
John Updike, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Eudora Welty, John Cheever, William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, and E. Annie Proulx are just some of the amazing authors to have been honored over the years. Not a bad list!
The National Book Awards began in 1950 when The Man With the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren was named America’s best piece of fiction from the previous year and today the Awards are the most important event on the US literary calendar.
AbeBooks is supporting the anniversary, so step back in time and revisit the full list of classic works of fiction honored by the National Book Awards.
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Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
Works: The Romances of Alexandre Dumas. Complete 48-volume set.
The National Post’s blog “The Afterword” features an interview with Canada’s first national book-collecting contest winner, Charlotte Ashley. The contest, sponsored by The Bibliographical Society of Canada (BSC), the Antiquarian Booksellers of Association of Canada (ABAC) and the Alcuin Society, “was created … to encourage young Canadians to collect books and study the discipline of researching and writing bibliographies.”
Ashley won the contest for her collection The Works (and Quirks) of Alexandre Dumas pere and was presented with $2,500.
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Thursday, June 11th, 2009
Announced just now, Michael Thomas’ book Man Gone Down has been awarded the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award - one of the richest literary prizes available at 100,000 euros.
The judges had this to say about the novel:
We never know his name. But the African-American protagonist of Michael Thomas’ masterful debut, Man Gone Down, will stay with readers for a long time. He lingers because this extraordinary novel comes to us from a writer of enthralling voice and startling insight. Tuned urgently to the way we live now, the winner of the International Dublin IMPAC Prize 2009 is a novel brilliant in its scope and energy, and deeply moving in its human warmth
This marks the first time that an American has won the award
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Thursday, June 11th, 2009
An IT director Farahad Zama’s has been awarded the Melissa Nathan award for comedy romance, beating out an five other shortlisted authors, all female.
The Guardian reports that Zama is the first man to win the award and that he wrote this, his debut, novel in 300 word chunks on his 40 minute commute to work.
The Novel The Marriage Bureau for Rich People is, as Zama discribes it, “not a typical chick lit book. It’s set in India, and deals with reasonably serious topics – but at heart it is a romantic novel.”
This is the second year that the Melissa Nathan award has been given, it comes with a £5,000 prize, is the only award in the UK for comedy romance, and is awarded in memory of Melissa Nathan - a bestselling athor who died of cancer in 2006.
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Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
Congratulations to Edward L. Ferman (editor and publisher), Michael Whelan (artist), Frank R. Paul (artist) and Connie Willis (author) on being the 2009 inductees into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
The four join the ranks of such celebrated names as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Robert A. Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Jules Verne, and many many more.
I’m happy to see Connie Willis in there, finally -I think The Doomsday Book is among the finest pieces of science fiction ever written. It’s an excellent book.
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame is found at the EMP/SFM (Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum) in Seattle, which, if you’ve never attended, is a pretty cool and fascinating way to spend a half day or so (no fewer than three hours - last time I went I rushed, and was pretty disappointed).
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Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
Anthony Browne, author and illustrator of such books as Willy the Chimp, Gorilla and Zoo has been named Britain’s sixth laureate for children. 
Browne intends to use his two year appointment as laureate to promote illustrated books which he feels are undervalued - “I’ve heard parents say, ‘oh you don’t want to get a book like that, come and get a proper book’. I think it’s a terrible shame that picture books and pictures in general (are viewed in this way),” Browne commented to Reuters.
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Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
Marilynne Robinson has won this years Orange Prize for Fiction, for her third novel, Home; a companion novel to her Pulitzer Prize winning effort Gilead.
If you’re looking for a nice little momento I suggest a signed copy, as there is a decent chance they will only go up in value from here onward.
The £30,000 prize, which is given to the best work of English-language fiction by a female author, was awarded earlier today in London.
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Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
Not to be confused with the Man Booker Prize, the International Prize is awarded every two years to a living author whose work has contributed to fiction on the world stage.
Alice Munro is the third recipient of this prize, previous winners were Ismail Kadaré in 2005 and Chinua Achebe in 2007.
We were all quite excited to hear this news, since Alice Munro is Canadian (like us) and has close ties to Victoria (where AbeBooks HQ is located).
Back in 1951 Alice married James Munro and the couple moved west and had some children. In 1966 they opened Munro’s Books, a Victoria landmark and one of the nicest bookstores you will find in Canada.
So a big congratulations to Alice Munro, I’m sure she will enjoy the £60,000 prize.
Posted in Canada, author, awards, prize | 1 Comment »
Thursday, May 14th, 2009
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Monday, April 27th, 2009
Interesting concept…The University of Alabama Libraries hosts an annual competition where students showcase their personal book collections around a specific topic.
The idea is to get students to focus on their area of interest and bring it together with their love of books and reading.
Read more from the University paper…
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Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
How cool. StarShipSofa, the Audio Science Fiction Magazine, has done something nifty and made all seven of the 2008 Nebula nominees, short story category, available as free audio podcasts. So you can download the podcasts, listen to them at your convenience, and decide on your favourite contender before the winners are even announced (if you’re quick - winners announced April 24-25). From their web site:
“Tony, who helms the podcast, says, “The Nebula’s are a very special event in the SF world and I wanted the StarShipSofa to mark this occasion by doing something unique for this year’s awards. “I wanted to put out all the stories nominated in one day so people can, straight away, have them downloaded back to back… sitting on their iPod and, for the next few hours, submerge themselves in SF stories of the very best calibre. All for free. “Things are changing rapidly in this medium and this is one example of StarShipSofa pushing the boundaries of normal podcasting in both terms of quality and accessibility. “It’s what the StarShipSofa was built for.” “
For me, I’d rather read them than listen to them any day. For some reason, my attention span serves far better for reading than for listening, and I find with audiobooks, I really miss a lot of the intended twists and nuances. But for those who don’t find that a problem, this is a real treat.
And in case you missed it, AbeBooks has every book that has ever won a Nebula or Hugo Award in the novel category for sale, as well as comprehensive lists of the winners. Glorious science fiction!
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Thursday, March 12th, 2009
Barack Obama once again finds himself up against some stiff competition. This time it’s not in the political arena but the literary one.
Obama is up for two British book awards - Border’s Author of the Year for his book The Audacity of Hope and Tesco’s Biography of the Year for Dreams of My Father.
The competition are no light-weights. Also up for the Author of the Year award are 2008 Man Booker Prize winner, Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger) and Orange Prize winner, Rose Tremain (The Road Home).
Last year, Ian McEwan took home the Author of the Year award for his book, On Chesil Beach and Khaled Hosseini was the winner in the Biography of the Year award with A Thousand Splendid Suns.
The awards honouring bestsellers and literary prize winners are decided based on a mix of public and industry votes and will be announced in London on April 3, 2009.
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