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NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE ANNOUNCES WINNERS FOR PUBLISHING YEAR 2023
by Members of the National Book Critics Circle Board
March 21, 2024
New York, NY (March 21, 2024)—Tonight at the New School, the National Book Critics Circle announced the recipients of its book awards for publishing year 2023. As NBCC President Heather Scott Partington stated, “We celebrate your imagination, your fearlessness, and your persistence. Your words are essential, particularly in this time of division and censorship.”
The winners include Lorrie Moore in fiction, for I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home (Knopf). Committee chair David Varno declared: “I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is a heartbreaking and hilarious ghost story about a man who considers what it means to be human in a world infected by, as Moore puts it, ‘voluntary insanity.’ It’s an unforgettable achievement from a landmark American author.”
Roxanna Asgarian won the nonfiction award for We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, & Child Removal in America (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux). Committee chair Jo Livingstone described We Were Once a Family as “a meticulous, harrowing, and deeply empathetic investigation into the murder-suicide of six children and their adoptive parents.”
The winner for autobiography was Safiya Sinclair for How to Say Babylon: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster). As committee member Jane Ciabattari stated, “Safiya Sinclair’s intimately crafted memoir is unforgettable and a shining example of why poets should write prose. The Eden of Sinclair’s Jamaican childhood is irrevocably altered under her father’s strict Rastafarian upbringing which first constrains, and then threatens, her life. Discovering the power of her own voice sets her free.”
The biography award went to Jonny Steinberg, author of Winnie & Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage (Knopf). Committee chair Elizabeth Taylor noted that “Steinberg’s deeply insightful, painstakingly researched Winnie and Nelson unmasks the Mandelas, sliding past their public mythos, and the simpler romantic narrative they told each other, to reveal the emotional labyrinth beneath. With its exploration of two radically different approaches to apartheid, this beautiful biography speaks movingly to present-day struggles for racial justice.”
Tina Post won the criticism award for Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression (NYU Press). Committee chair J. Howard Rosier praised Deadpan as “a book that recontextualizes the act of withholding to taxonomize its origins and uses—specifically, the tact it assumes when intersecting with blackness.”
The winner for poetry was Kim Hyesoon for Phantom Pain Wings, translated by Don Mee Choi (New Directions). Committee chair Rebecca Morgan Frank observed, “Phantom Pain Wings presents a stunningly original and audacious work in which grief and interventions with patriarchy and war trauma are embodied in a capacious and visceral ventriloquism that Kim Hyesoon calls an ‘I-do-bird sequence’: ‘Bird cuts me out/like the way sunlight cuts out shadows // Hole enters/the spot where I was cut out/I exit.’”
The Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, which honors both the author and translator, went to Maureen Freely’s translation of the late author Tezer Özlü’s Cold Nights of Childhood (Transit Books). As committee chair Mandana Chaffa remarked, “Maureen Freely’s evocative translation from Turkish strikingly depicts the haunting interior life of an unsettled young woman seeking happiness and self-determination against the backdrop of a swiftly changing Turkish society.”
Tahir Hamut Izgil won the John Leonard Prize for Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide (Penguin Press), translated by Joshua L. Freeman. As committee chair Adam Dalva stated, “The John Leonard Prize for best debut book is voted on by NBCC members, who found this astonishing memoir both heartfelt and urgent, terrifying and illuminating. Izgil and Freeman offer a clear-eyed, beautifully rendered detailing of the ongoing atrocities committed against the Uyghurs, from the most personal of perspectives. As one voter put it: it’s a miracle that this book exists.”
The NBCC Service Award went to Marion Winik. As past NBCC President Megan Labrise said in her remarks, “This year’s award is for extraordinary service by an exceptional critic at a crucial time in the organization’s history.” Winik is the author of many books, including The Big Book of the Dead and Above Us Only Sky. Her reviews and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, People, Newsday, The Washington Post, NPR All Things Considered, and monthly at Baltimore Fishbowl, among other outlets. A former NBCC treasurer, Winik helped guide the organization through the pandemic. As Labrise stated: “Quantity and quality is the Winik way.”
The recipient of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, given to an NBCC member for exceptional critical work, was Becca Rothfeld. Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post, an editor at The Point, a contributing editor at The Boston Review, and author of the forthcoming debut essay collection All Things Are Too Small. Rothfeld’s reviews of Benjamin Labatut’s brainy novel The Maniac and Senator Josh Hawley’s self-help book Manhood, “dazzled the judges with depth, range, humor and elegant writing,” stated Balakian committee chair Colette Bancroft. “The reviews brilliantly embodied her insight, range and depth of knowledge in lively and persuasive prose.”
The recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award was Judy Blume. As award chair Jacob M. Appel states, “Blume, whose widely acclaimed works include such modern classics as Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, has inspired generations of young readers by tackling the emotional turbulence of girlhood and adolescence with authenticity, candor and courage. As her works generated controversy, she earned a national reputation as a relentless opponent of censorship and an iconic champion of literary freedom.” Blume accepted the award remotely from the bookstore she runs in Key West, thanking the American Library Association for “their tireless work in protecting our intellectual freedoms,” and her parents for “the freedom to choose my own books. They never judged what I wanted to read….Their encouragement kept me going.”
The recipient of the Toni Morrison Achievement Award, established by the NBCC in 2021 to honor institutions that have made lasting and meaningful contributions to book culture, was the American Library Association. As Appel states, “We honor the ALA for its longstanding commitment to equity, including its twentieth century campaigns against library segregation and for LGBT+ literature, and its perennial stance as a bulwark against those regressive and illiberal supporters of book bans. At a time when our nation’s libraries remain under relentless assault from both political and economic forces, the ALA towers over the literary landscape as a beacon for our most vulnerable voices.”
The National Book Critics Circle Awards, founded in 1974 at the Algonquin Hotel and considered among the most prestigious in American letters, are the sole prizes bestowed by a jury of working critics and book review editors.
Recipients of the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Awards
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster)
BIOGRAPHY
Jonny Steinberg, Winnie & Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage (Knopf)
CRITICISM
Tina Post, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression (NYU Press)
FICTION
Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home (Knopf)
NONFICTION
Roxanna Asgarian, We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, & Child Removal in America (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)
POETRY
Kim Hyesoon, Phantom Pain Wings, translated by Don Mee Choi (New Directions)
GREGG BARRIOS BOOK IN TRANSLATION PRIZE
Maureen Freely’s translation of Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü (Transit Books)
JOHN LEONARD PRIZE
Tahir Hamut Izgil, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide, translated by Joshua L. Freeman (Penguin Press)
NBCC SERVICE AWARD
Marion Winik
NONA BALAKIAN CITATION FOR EXCELLENCE IN REVIEWING
Becca Rothfeld
TONI MORRISON ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
American Library Association
IVAN SANDROF LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Judy Blume
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Announcing the 2024 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction Shortlist!
The six books that make up the first ever Women’s Prize for Nonfiction shortlist are diverse in subject matter but united in their originality.
So, stop what you are doing and take a seat, because the inaugural Women’s Prize for Nonfiction shortlist is here!
The six books cover a broad range of subjects—from life writing, religion, art and history, to AI, social media, and online politics. What links them is an originality of voice and an ability to turn complex ideas and personal trauma into inventive, compelling, and immersive prose.
The 2024 shortlist takes readers to new places and introduces new perspectives, offering an alternative lens through which we can examine our past, present, and impending future.
Our magnificent shortlist is made up of six powerful, impressive books that are characterized by the brilliance and beauty of their writing and which each offer a unique, original perspective. The readers of these books will never see the world—be it through art, history, landscape, politics, religion, or technology—the same again.
PROFESSOR SUZANNAH LIPSCOMB, CHAIR OF JUDGES; BROADCASTER AND WRITER
The shortlist consists of works that either challenge prevalent ideas or reclaim narratives from our past, whilst breaking new ground in nonfiction writing. So without further ado, introducing the 2024 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction shortlist.
The full list in alphabetical order by author surname is:
Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art & Life & Sudden Death by Laura Cumming, published by Chatto & Windus
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein, published by Allen Lane
A Flat Place by Noreen Masud, published by Hamish Hamilton
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles, published by Profile
Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia, published by Picador
How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir by Safiya Sinclair, published by 4th Estate
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Maryse Condé, Guadeloupean “grand storyteller” dies aged 90
Author of novels drawing on African and Caribbean history enjoyed international acclaim, including the New Academy prize, which stood in for the Nobel in 2018.Sian Cain
Tue 2 Apr 2024 04.51 EDT
The Guardian
Maryse Condé, the Guadeloupean author of more than 20 novels, activist, academic, and sole winner of the New Academy prize in literature, has died aged 90.
Condé, whose books include Segu and Hérémakhonon was regarded as a giant of the West Indies, writing frankly—as both a novelist and essayist—of colonialism, sexuality, and the black diaspora, and introduced readers around the world to a wealth of African and Caribbean history.
Writing of the “unputdownable and unforgettable” epic Segu, Booker winner Bernardine Evaristo praised her as “an extraordinary storyteller,” while author Justin Torres wrote: “One is never on steady ground with Condé; she is not an ideologue, and hers is not the kind of liberal, safe, down-the-line morality that leaves the reader unimplicated.”
Alain Mabanckou, the award-winning Congolese writer and professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, wrote on X that Condé was the “Grande Dame of World Letters” and had bequeathed a body of work “driven by the quest for a humanism based on the ramifications of our identities and the fractures in history.”
Born Maryse Boucolon in Guadeloupe in 1934, the youngest of eight children, Condé described herself as a “spoilt child … oblivious to the outside world.” Her parents, she told the Guardian, never taught her about slavery and “were convinced France was the best place in the world.” She went to Paris at 16 for her education, but was expelled from school after two years: “When I came to study in France, I discovered people’s prejudices. People believed I was inferior just because I was black. I had to prove to them I was gifted and to show to everybody that the color of my skin didn’t matter—what matters is in your brain and in your heart.”
Studying at the Sorbonne, she began to learn about African history and slavery from fellow students and found sympathy with the Communist movement. She became pregnant after an affair with Haitian activist Jean Dominique. In 1958, she married the Guinean actor Mamadou Condé, a decision she later admitted was a means of regaining status as a black single mother. Within months their relationship was strained, and Condé moved to the Ivory Coast, spending the next decade in various African countries including Guinea, Senegal, Mali, and Ghana, mixing with Che Guevera, Malcolm X, Julius Nyerere, Maya Angelou, future Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo, and Senegalese filmmaker and author Ousmane Sembène.
Unable to speak local languages and presumed to hold Francophile sympathies, Condé struggled to find her place in Africa. “I know now just how badly prepared I was to encounter Africa,” she would later say. “I had a very romantic vision, and I just wasn’t prepared, either politically or socially.” She remained outspoken until she was accused of subversive activity in Ghana and deported to London, where she worked as a BBC producer for two years. She eventually returned to France and earned her MA and Ph.D. in comparative literature at Paris-Sorbonne University in 1975.
Her debut novel, Hérémakhonon, was published in 1976, with Condé saying she waited until she was nearly 40 because she “didn’t have confidence in myself and did not dare present my writing to the outside world.” The novel follows a Paris-educated Guadeloupean woman, who realizes that her struggle to locate her identity is an internal journey, rather than a geographical one. Condé later recalled the Ghanaian author Ama Ata Aidoo telling her: “Africa … has codes that are easy to understand. It’s because you’re looking for something else … a land that is a foil that would allow you to be what you dream of being. And on that level, nobody can help you.” “I think she may have been right,” Condé later wrote.
In 1981, she divorced her husband after a long separation and, the following year she married one of her English-language translators, Richard Philcox.
She gained prominence as a contemporary Caribbean writer with her third novel, Segu, in 1984. The novel follows the life of Dousika Traore, a royal adviser in the titular African kingdom in the late-18th century, who must deal with encroaching challenges from religion, colonization, and the slave trade over six decades. It was a bestseller and praised as “the most significant novel about black Africa published in many a year” by the New York Times.
The next year she published a sequel, The Children of Segu, and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to teach in the US. Over the coming decades, she would become a prolific writer of children’s books, plays, and essays, including, in 1986, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, based on the story of an American slave who was tried for witchcraft; Tree of Life in 1987; Crossing the Mangrove in 1989; Windward Heights, a Caribbean retelling of Wuthering Heights, in 1995; Desirada in 1997; The Belle Créole in 2001; The Story of the Cannibal Woman in 2003; and Victorie: My Mother’s Mother, in which she reconstructed the life of her illiterate grandmother, in 2006.
After teaching in New York, Los Angeles, and Berkeley, Condé retired in 2005. She wrote two memoirs: 2001’s Tales from the Heart: True Stories from My Childhood, and in 2017, What is Africa to Me? She was awarded France’s Legion of Honour in 2004, and shortlisted for the Man Booker International prize, then a lifetime achievement award, in 2015. When she won the New Academy prize, the one-off award intended to replace the Nobel prize in literature when it was cancelled in 2018, she described herself as “very happy and proud.”
“But please allow me to share it with my family, my friends, and above all the people of Guadeloupe, who will be thrilled and touched seeing me receive this prize,” she said. “We are such a small country, only mentioned when there are hurricanes or earthquakes and things like that. Now we are so happy to be recognized for something else.”
In her final years, she lived in the south of France with Philcox. Her novel The Wondrous & Tragic Life of Ivan & Ivana, translated into English in 2020, explores the dangers of binary thinking through the lives of two twins. Her eyesight became too bad for her to write unassisted, so she wrote her last books by dictating to a friend.
Her last novel, The Gospel According to the New World, published in 2021 and translated into English in March 2023, was shortlisted for the International Booker prize. The novel follows the journey of a baby rumored to be the child of God.
Writing, she once wrote, “has given me enormous joy. I would rather compare it to a compulsion, somewhat scary, whose cause I have never been able to unravel.”
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Claire Jiménez’s “What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez?” wins the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Claire Jiménez’s “What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez?,” a hard-hitting and comic novel set in New York City about a Puerto Rican family’s search for a missing girl, has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
by The Associated Press
April 2, 2024, 2:55 PMNEW YORK—Claire Jiménez’s “What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez?,” a hard-hitting and comic novel set in New York City about a Puerto Rican family’s search for a missing girl, has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
The award, announced Tuesday, includes a $15,000 cash prize.
“Claire Jiménez has crafted a visceral work of art full of nuance, humor, and humanity, through incisive and loving character work, the finely calibrated unspooling of narrative, and the exquisite deployment of language, ranging from poetic prose to Spanglish to the sociolect of working-class Staten Island,” according to a statement by the prize judges.
The four other finalists—Jamel Brinkley for “Witness,” Henry Hoke for “Open Throat,” Alice McDermott for “Absolution,” and Colin Winnette for “Users”—will each receive $5,000.
Previous winners of the PEN/Faulkner award include Philip Roth, Ann Patchett, and Deesha Philyaw.
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INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE FOR FICTION SHORTLIST 2024
Not a River
by Selva Almada; translated by Annie McDermottMater 2–10
by Hwang Sok-yong; translated by Sora Kim-Russell & Youngjae Josephine BaeWhat I’d Rather Not Think About
by Jente Posthuma; translated by Sarah Timmer HarveyCrooked Plow
by Itamar Vieira Junior; translated by Johnny LorenzKairos
by Jenny Erpenbeck; translated by Michael HofmannThe Details
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by Ia Genberg; translated by Kira Josefsson
Anne Enright, Kate Grenville, & Isabella Hammad shortlisted for Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024
Capturing “an enormous breadth of the human experience,” the six shortlisted novels compete for a £30,000 prize to be awarded in June.Ella Creamer
The Guardian
Wed 24 Apr 2024 03.00 EDT
Anne Enright, Kate Grenville, and Isabella Hammad are among the contenders for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, on a shortlist that features migration as a recurring theme.
French-Chinese-American writer Aube Rey Lescure was shortlisted for River East, River West, a reversal of the east-to-west immigrant narrative, set against China’s economic boom. Lescure is the only debut writer on this year’s shortlist, despite the fact that debuts made up half of the longlist.
British writer Hammad, whose father is Palestinian, was shortlisted for Enter Ghost, which follows actor Sonia as she travels from London to Haifa to visit her sister and joins an Arabic production of Hamlet in the West Bank. The novel “takes you deep inside the protagonist’s experience, while opening a wider window on to life for Palestinians and their exhausting day-to-day struggles,” wrote Holly Williams in the Guardian.
American writer VV Ganeshananthan, who is of Ilankai Tamil descent, was shortlisted for Brotherless Night, about a girl born in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, who dreams of becoming a doctor before civil war subsumes the country and those around her are swept up in violent political ideologies. “A powerful book that has the intimacy of memoir, the range and ambition of an epic, and tells a truly unforgettable story about the Sri Lankan civil war,” said judge and author Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀.
The winner of the prize, worth £30,000, will be announced at a ceremony in London on 13 June 24, alongside the announcement of the inaugural Women’s Prize for Nonfiction winner.
The shortlist “features six brilliant, thought-provoking, and spellbinding novels that between them capture an enormous breadth of the human experience,” said judging chair and author Monica Ali. “Readers will be captivated by the characters, the luminous writing, and the exquisite storytelling. Each book is gloriously compelling and inventive and lingers in the heart and mind long after the final page.”
Australian author Grenville, who won the Women’s prize—then called the Orange prize—in 2001 for The Idea of Perfection, has been shortlisted for Restless Dolly Maunder, the imagined story of Grenville’s maternal grandmother, born at the end of the 19th century, and her search for independence. “The writing sparkles with Grenville’s gift for transcendently clear imagery,” wrote Kirsten Tranter in her Guardian review. The book is “a work of history, biography, story, and memoir, all fused into a novel that suggests the great potential of literary art as redeemer, healer, and pathway to understanding”.
Enright’s shortlisted novel The Wren, The Wren is about the relationship between the daughter and granddaughter of a deceased poet. “All the vividness of characterization that her readers have come to expect is here, and so is the wry, almost surreal wit with which she has always laced her acute observations of human folly,” wrote Fintan O’Toole in the Guardian.
Fellow Irish writer Claire Kilroy also made the list with Soldier Sailor, an account of early motherhood in the form of an internal monologue addressed from mother to son. Kilroy’s “first novel in 10 years is a whole-body experience”, wrote Sarah Crown in the Guardian. “The novel is brief but utterly remorseless—it comes at you full-throttle, as if delivered on a single breath.”
Joining Ali and Adébáyọ̀ on the judging panel were author and illustrator Laura Dockrill, actor Indira Varma, and presenter and author Anna Whitehouse.
The 10 longlisted titles that did not make the shortlist were Hangman by Maya Binyam, In Defence of the Act by Effie Black, And Then She Fell by Alicia Elliott, The Maiden by Kate Foster, 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster by Mirinae Lee, The Blue, Beautiful World by Karen Lord, Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, Nightbloom by Peace Adzo Medie, Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan, and A Trace of Sun by Pam Williams.
Recent winners of the prize include Ruth Ozeki for The Book of Form & Emptiness, Susanna Clarke for Piranesi, and Maggie O’Farrell for Hamnet. In 2023, Barbara Kingsolver won the award for Demon Copperhead, which also co-won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
ReplyCopy URLFew people realize that a screenwriter is a very difficult task when writing a script for a movie or TV series. Since for writing you need to maximize the creativity of thought and have the soul of a real writer, it can be even difficult for an ordinary person to write a banal essay. But now it is not a problem, when there are specially trained people who know how to write texts for different technical assignments. Just take and place your custom essay assignment through the service EssayShark .
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Paul Auster, the Patron Saint of Literary Brooklyn, Dies at 77
With critically lauded works like “The New York Trilogy,” the charismatic author drew inspiration from his adopted borough and won worldwide acclaim.
UPDATED MAY 1, 2024 9:13 AM ET
by Tom Vitale
NPRBest-selling author Paul Auster, whose novels addressed existential questions of identity, language, and literature, and created mysteries that raised more questions than they answered, has died. He was 77.
The writer died on Tuesday at his home in Brooklyn due to complications from lung cancer, his friend and fellow author Jacki Lyden confirmed.
In March 2023, Auster’s wife, author Siri Hustvedt, announced he had been diagnosed with cancer.
A leading figure in his generation of post-modern American writers, Auster wrote more than 20 novels, including The New York Trilogy, which included his 1985 breakthrough book, City of Glass, and his ambitious 2017 novel 4 3 2 1, which ran close to 1,000 pages. His decades-long career included a stream of novels, memoirs, story collections, plays, essays, and poems.
“I think he was a really exciting and compelling voice of his generation,” says Alys Moody, a professor who teaches postwar American literature. “Auster will be remembered for being one of the leading figures in a post-modern tradition that’s reimagining how central language is, and how central writing is, and how central above all storytelling is.”
Auster was born in 1947 in Newark, N.J., to Jewish middle-class parents of Austrian descent. After he graduated from Columbia University with undergraduate and Master’s degrees, he moved to Paris. There, he supported himself by translating French literature. Auster returned to the United States in 1974, part of a disillusioned generation. In a private 1992 interview with me, he said his novel Leviathan was about a character much like himself: “Someone filled with a kind of idealistic hope about what could be done about the future of the country and the world, who saw all these dreams bit by bit be dismantled by subsequent political events.”
In his 20s, Auster published his own essays, poems, and translations. A strange event in 1980 led to his first novel.
“I was living alone in Brooklyn. And I did receive a telephone call,” he recalled. “And the person on the other end asked if he had reached the Pinkerton Agency. And, of course, I said no and hung up. But after the second or third time, I said, well, what if I said Yes? And that was the genesis of the novel.”
The story of that novel, City of Glass, is set in motion when the main character, a detective fiction writer named Quinn, gets a late night phone call:
“I would like to speak to Mr. Paul Auster.”
“There’s no one here by that name.”
“Paul Auster. Of the Auster Detective Agency.”
“I’m sorry,” said Quinn. “You must have the wrong number.”
“This is a matter of utmost urgency,” said the voice.
“There’s nothing I can do for you,” said Quinn. “There is no Paul Auster here.”
“You don’t understand,” said the voice. “Time is running out.”
The writer in the novel takes on the identity of the detective, who sets out to solve the mystery of “what is reality?” He was sometimes criticized for the bizarre coincidences in his work, but the events of his life, he said, outstripped the implausibility in his fiction.
“When I was about 13 or 14 years old and, I was off at a summer camp, and we got caught in a storm. And a boy standing next to me was killed by a bolt of lightning. Dropped dead. Struck down by the sky. I think maybe that informs my work more than any book I have ever read,” he explained.
The sudden death of his father prompted Auster to write 1982’s The Invention of Solitude, a haunting reflection on father-son relationships, which became a recurring theme.
Auster also wrote and co-directed a handful of independent films. He wrote the screenplay for 1995’s Smoke, a film about a Brooklyn tobacco shop, starring Harvey Keitel, which won the writer an Independent Spirit Award. Auster also co-directed the follow-up, Blue in the Face, which starred Keitel again.
He was never at a loss for words. In 2017, he published an 880-page novel called 4 3 2 1 that told the story of one main character, an everyman named Archie Ferguson, in four different versions, in alternating chapters, exploring the nuances of U.S. society. The author was said to have considered it his masterwork, although it received mixed reviews from critics. It was later short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.
When he finished that book, he decided to take a break from fiction, so he began writing a 780-page biography of 19th century author Stephen Crane.
“I have tried in my books to turn myself inside out as much as possible,” he said. “And not to hide behind style, tricks—whatever you might call it.”
His breakthrough came with The New York Trilogy, a philosophical twist on the detective genre centered on a shady quartet of private investigators named Blue, Brown, Black, and White.
His subsequent novels included Timbuktu and existential capers Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, and Leviathan.
Auster was praised for his sharp dialogue, and his books have been translated into more than 40 languages.
Last year, Auster published Bloodbath Nation along with his photographer son-in-law Spencer Ostrander, which focused on gun violence in America.
Auster’s text was accompanied by Ostrander’s black-and-white pictures from the sites of 30 mass shootings.
In recent years, Auster’s own life was struck by tragedy, with his 10-month-old granddaughter Ruby dying after ingesting heroin and his son Daniel, the child’s father, dying of an overdose 10 months later.
Prior to his death, Daniel had been found guilty of negligent homicide. Auster never publicly discussed their deaths.
His final novel, Baumgartner, about a widowed septuagenarian writer, was published in October.
Auster, whose literary influences included Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, will be remembered for the purity of his language, and the seriousness of his intent.
Auster is survived by his wife Hustvedt, their daughter Sophie Auster, his sister Janet Auster, and a grandson.
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March 25, 2024
Pulitzer Prizes Launch PodcastFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contact:
Marjorie Miller, Administrator, The Pulitzer Prizes
pulitzer@pulitzer.org or 212-854-3841New York, NY (March 25, 2024)–The Pulitzer Prizes today announced the launch of a podcast, part of a broad public outreach initiative celebrating the work of Pulitzer Prize winners with audiences across the country.
The six podcast episodes of Pulitzer on the Road will be released weekly beginning today, each featuring 2023 winners in Journalism and Books in conversation with Pulitzer Board members, delving into the stories behind their work.
Guests on this spring’s podcast series include Fiction winners Barbara Kingsolver and Hernan Diaz; Explanatory Reporting winner Caitlin Dickerson of The Atlantic; Local Reporting winners John Archibald and Ashley Remkus from AL.com; and Public Service named contributor Mstyslav Chernov of the team at the Associated Press.
“Pulitzer on the Road is an effort to offer audiences insights into how these works are produced and what makes them prize-worthy,” said Pulitzer Prize Administrator Marjorie Miller. “We want to show how journalism and the arts play important roles in democracy.”
The podcast is produced and hosted by Board member Nicole Carroll, a professor of practice at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The six episodes also feature Pulitzer Board members Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute; Boston Globe Editor Nancy Barnes; Ginger Thompson, ProPublica’s chief of correspondents; University of California, Los Angeles historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez; Emily Ramshaw, chief executive officer of The 19th; and author Viet Thanh Nguyen of the University of Southern California.
In the first episode, Small Town Shakedown, released today, reporter John Archibald talks to Brown about how the news team of AL.com uncovered police corruption in Brookside, Alabama to win the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. The journalists showed that officers preyed on residents to increase revenue by 640% in two years, largely from pulling over drivers on misdemeanor charges, confiscating cars and saddling citizens with fines and fees of hundreds to thousands of dollars.
In subsequent episodes released over the next five weeks, Caitlin Dickerson from The Atlantic explains the evolution of the Trump administration’s Zero Tolerance policy of taking children from their immigrant parents at the border. Mstyslav Chernov of the Associated Press recounts how he and his team were the last international journalists in Mariupol, Ukraine, when the Russia invasion began. They won Pulitzer Prizes in Explanatory Reporting and Public Service, respectively.
“I hope listeners come away feeling the impact of this work,” host Carroll said.
“In Brookside, reporters uncovered a police scheme that was costing local citizens dearly. In Mariupol, the AP journalists exposed Russian atrocities while placing themselves in grave danger. This type of journalism is time consuming, it’s costly and it’s critically important. With the other authors, I hope this podcast encourages people to read and discuss their thought-provoking work,” Carroll said.
Other episodes will feature the Prizes for Books. 2023 History winner Jefferson Cowie travels back to Eufaula, Alabama, to show the evolution and terrible consequences of white supremacy in one town. There were two Fiction winners in 2023 and each is featured in an episode: author Hernan Diaz shares stories behind his winning novel, “Trust”; and Barbara Kingsolver discusses “Demon Copperhead,” her novel of coming of age in Appalachia.
The Pulitzer on the Road Podcast will be released each Monday through April 29 and will be accessible on Apple, Spotify, and other platforms.
The 2024 Pulitzer Prizes will be announced on Monday, May 6.
The Pulitzer on the Road Podcast is produced in collaboration with the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, and Central Sound at Arizona PBS, with the support of the Knight Foundation. Miller is the executive producer.
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April 25, 2024
The 2024 Pulitzer Prize AnnouncementAdministrator Marjorie Miller will announce the 2024 Pulitzer Prize winners and nominated finalists, awarded and designated on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize Board at Columbia University, via livestream on May 6 at 3 p.m. Eastern time. A media kit also will be available here. The 2024 cycle marks the 108th conferral of the Prizes.
For more information on past Prize winners and finalists in Journalism, Books, Drama and Music, please visit the Prize Winner section of Pulitzer.org to find biographical information and read winning & nominated work in Journalism. To learn more about the ongoing Pulitzer on the Road initiative, click here.
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May 2, 2024
A Statement From the Pulitzer Prize BoardAs we gather to consider the nation’s finest and most courageous journalism, the Pulitzer Prize Board would like to recognize the tireless efforts of student journalists across our nation’s college campuses, who are covering protests and unrest in the face of great personal and academic risk. We would also like to acknowledge the extraordinary real-time reporting of student journalists at Columbia University, where the Pulitzer Prizes are housed, as the New York Police Department was called onto campus on Tuesday night. In the spirit of press freedom, these students worked to document a major national news event under difficult and dangerous circumstances and at risk of arrest.
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“Perhaps the great Australian novel”: Alexis Wright wins Stella prize for second time with Praiseworthy
The 73-year-old has won the $60,000 prize for Australian female and non-binary writers for her “genre-bending” 736-page novel.Kelly Burke
Thu 2 May 2024 07.00 EDT
THE GUARDIAN
Alexis Wright has made history by becoming the first person to win the Stella prize for literature twice.
On Thursday night, the 73-year-old Waanyi writer collected the $60,000 prize, awarded to outstanding literature by Australian women and non-binary authors, for her fourth novel, Praiseworthy, a book of epic scale praised by the judges as “genre-bending” and “canon-breaking.”
Wright also won the Stella in 2018 for Tracker, her nonfiction collective memoir on the Indigenous leader and activist Tracker Tilmouth. Wright worked on Tracker and Praiseworthy simultaneously, with the latter 736-page novel taking almost a decade to complete.
Wright said that Praiseworthy was a product of its time.
“We need works of scale in literature at the moment, because of the urgency of what’s happening,” she said, referring to the novel’s exploration of the climate crisis and how it affects the “tumbledown life of poverty” within the fictional and former prize-winning tidy town of Praiseworthy, imagined in Australia’s northern region of Carpentaria.
“We need to think deeply about these issues, and we can’t sit around hoping that everything’s going to be OK,” she said. “My thinking in developing this book is that a lot of people keep telling Aboriginal [people] that we must have hope. But I don’t think it’s hope that’s going to get us very far.
“When you look back at our survival here, as the oldest living culture, I don’t think our people got through all those thousands of years by sitting around with hope. There is a very strong desire to survive and to take our culture into the future.”
Praiseworthy’s central protagonist, Cause Man Steel, is an enterprising local who dreams of becoming Australia’s first Indigenous billionaire. After an ominous haze descends on the town, Cause envisions a post-fossil fuel world where alternative forms of transportation will be needed to move Australians across the enormous continent. He dreams of harnessing an element of colonization’s detritus–the 5 million feral donkeys in remote Australia–in readiness for a carbon-neutral future.
Meanwhile, his eight-year-old son, Tommyhawk, is immersed in the internet, becoming increasingly paranoid for his safety as he consumes media reports about child sexual predation in remote communities such as his.
It is Wright’s personal confrontation to the Howard government’s 2007 Northern Territory National Emergency Response, a contentious range of policies also known as “the intervention.” Wright calls it “a backward step” and a “tragedy,” adding that with global warming affecting remote communities surviving in some of the world’s hottest and driest environments, “we’ve got a much harder job now … and we still don’t have much control over what happens here.”
The Stella prize judges praised Wright’s voice in Praiseworthy as “operatic” in its intensity.
“Wright’s use of language and imagery is poetic and expansive, creating an immersive, bleak multiverse,” the judges’ statement said. “Readers will be buoyed by Praiseworthy’s aesthetic and technical quality, and winded by the tempestuous pace of Wright’s political satire.”
Reviewed by the New York Times in February, Praiseworthy was hailed as “the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century”, an appraisal the Stella chair of judges, Beejay Silcox, concurs with.
“Praiseworthy is not only a great Australian novel–perhaps the great Australian novel–it is also a great Waanyi novel,” Silcox said in her statement.
“And it is written in the wild hope that, one day, all Australian readers might understand just what that means. I do not understand. Not yet. But I can feel history calling to me in these pages. Calling to all of us. Imagine if we listened.”
In September, Praiseworthy won the University of Queensland fiction book award. It has also been shortlisted for the Queensland premier’s award for a work of state significance, the prestigious €100,000 International Dublin literary award, and the James Tait Black memorial prize, the UK’s oldest prize for literature.
Wright said a lifetime of studying literature from across the world enabled her to understand how she “might write the book that I wanted to write”; a book incorporating 60,000 years of storytelling and an unswerving scrutiny of contemporary reality; a book whose “vision is dark, humor tar-black, narration irrepressible, language roiling and rococo,” according to Guardian critic Declan Fry.
“It has an Aboriginal consciousness in it, but it has a worldwide literary consciousness,” Wright said.
“Praiseworthy’s been developed through really deep thought and hard work over a long period of time, with many, many false starts and reworking and reworking and until I’m absolutely sure that every page, every part of that book stands up and won’t fall over.
“And it’s what I’ve hoped to achieve … to broaden the literary landscape here, to produce a work that’s right for our times here in this country and right for the times across the world.”
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OPINION: When Writers Silence Writers
PEN America and the authoritarian spirit.
by George Packer
THE ATLANTIC
May 3, 2024
For writers living under an authoritarian regime, the price of intellectual independence is clear—censorship, prison, exile—but so is its value. They are compelled to understand inner freedom as the essential condition for doing their work. Their determination to say what the state doesn’t want to hear gives them a sense of connection with one another, a community of writers, even if it happens underground. But authoritarianism is not just a form of government where leaders jut out their chins, jackbooted police march around with batons, and jails fill up with dissidents. It’s also a habit of mind, marked by impatience with complexity, intolerance of dissent, readiness to coerce agreement. The authoritarian spirit can infect democracies that have long traditions of freedom, but it uses weapons other than state power. The main one is public opinion.
Perversely, the same community that gives writers in repressive regimes the courage to say what the state doesn’t want to hear can, in a free society, become a tool of conformity and social coercion. In some ways, the threat of ostracism from your group is harder to resist than the threat of legal punishment from the state, because it undermines your sense of identity and belonging, your self-worth. Torture and prison are not the only ways to compel people to act against their own values and say what they don’t believe. The pressure to conform and the fear of being cast out have caused an entire political party to prostrate itself before Donald Trump. The authoritarian spirit seems capable of taking root in almost anyone, anywhere—at a MAGA rally, in a college classroom, even among a group of writers.
The organization PEN was founded more than a century ago to provide an international community of support for embattled writers. Today PEN’s American chapter is in crisis, because a group of writers has chosen to turn their community against the organization.
Last week a boycott forced PEN America to cancel its annual World Voices literary festival. The boycott’s leaders included authors of best-selling books and winners of prestigious fellowships and prizes—Naomi Klein, Lorrie Moore, Hari Kunzru, Michelle Alexander, and others. According to someone with intimate knowledge of the boycott, its pressure campaign, carried out strategically through online attacks and direct personal messages, was “merciless.” Invited panelists found themselves threatened with isolation by their colleagues or their communities. Some joined the boycott out of conviction. But others fell in line out of fear of harassment or concern for their careers, or they withdrew from the festival when they saw who else was withdrawing, or they worried about the “optics” of sitting on a depleted panel that lacked the requisite diversity. As the dominoes fell, there were more and more reasons not to be seen standing. After PEN America—on whose board I serve—announced the festival’s cancellation last week, a number of writers privately expressed their unhappiness, but almost nothing was said publicly.
We like to think of writers as courageous individuals who believe in free expression without fetters. In practice, they turn out to be no more able to resist the authoritarian spirit than most other people—maybe less. In the Soviet Union, many writers denounced their imprisoned friends without being told to. Here, they check their social-media traffic first.
The boycott succeeded in silencing 80 writers and artists who were scheduled to speak at the festival and did not join the boycott. They included a few from countries where the cost of free expression is more tangible than social scorn, such as the Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil, the Indian novelist Geetanjali Shree, the Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa, and five young Afghan women from ArtLords, an international organization of street artists devoted to human rights. After the women fled Afghanistan and became refugees, the Taliban painted over or erased all 2,200 of their murals. Now they’ve been silenced twice—the second time in a democratic country and by their fellow artists.
It isn’t a pretty sight when writers bully other writers into shutting down a celebration of world literature—especially when big names with the most expansive free-speech rights in the world take away a platform from lesser-known writers hoping to reach an audience outside their own repressive countries. Leyla Shukurova, an Azerbaijani German writer who just finished her first story collection and was planning to attend the festival, wrote after the event was canceled to thank PEN for “upholding the values that this festival, as well as PEN America as an organization, represents,” but she added: “The suppression of political discourse that we are witnessing right now in the US is very alarming and unsettling.”
The cancellation of one literary festival by writers—a kind of man-bites-dog story—may seem small, but it is part of a much bigger thing. The cause of the boycott was Gaza. In many ways, it’s a compelling cause. PEN America, like so many other organizations, had fallen into the habit of releasing statements about issues tangential or unrelated to its essential purpose. After October 7, PEN was internally divided over the war between Israel and Hamas, and slow to report on the deaths of scores of Palestinian writers, artists, and journalists. This response was unfavorably compared with PEN America’s vigorous stand for Ukraine after the Russian invasion. When I joined the board at the end of last year, I found an organization under siege from inside and outside. A number of writers and staff members wanted a much stronger response from PEN—not just on behalf of Palestinian writers, but against Israel. They wanted the organization to call for an immediate and permanent cease-fire; they wanted it to denounce Israel’s “genocide.”
These demands were political and geopolitical in a way that diverged from PEN’s charter and mission. They also threatened to tear the institution apart. When PEN balked, the writers found another way to impose their demands. Their boycott, like most protests, soon exceeded its original purpose of stating a position of individual conscience and turned into an organized campaign to shut down the festival, as well as PEN’s literary-awards ceremony. Criticizing PEN and Israel didn’t require silencing writers. Geetanjali Shree, the Indian novelist, wrote me afterward: “I hold strong views against Israel but I believe PEN stands for free dialogue and debate and in unequivocal defense of human rights.” But the writers’ disagreement with PEN had become a quest for power over PEN, even at the price of others’ right to free speech and the organization’s future. The boycott was an expression of the authoritarian spirit.
This turn was perhaps inevitable, because authoritarianism is the spirit of the times, around the world and in this country, where it animates both the right and the left. The two sides have vastly different values and goals, and they use different language—the left’s is academic and specialized (decolonization, imperialism, marginalization) while the right’s is crude and abusive (libtard, groomer, hoax). But in both cases, the words aren’t meant to invite a reply or open a dialogue; they shut discussion down. The two sides reflect and require each other, driving each other to greater extremes, while between them the center of Never Trump conservatives and traditional liberals, with their creaky institutions and halting appeals to reason, collapses.
This is how the authoritarian spirit plays out in a democracy. A party leader compels other politicians to defile their conscience and succumb to his dictates. A political rally turns into a violent effort to overturn an election. A student protest starts with calls for peace and ends in eliminationist chants, vandalism, closed campuses, and an invasion by police or state troopers. A group of writers bring an organization dedicated to their freedom to its knees.
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2024 PULITZER PRIZE WINNERS (JOURNALISM, LETTERS, DRAMA, & MUSIC)
JOURNALISM
Public Service
WINNER: ProPublica, for the work of Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Alex Mierjeski, & Kirsten Berg
FINALISTS:
KFF Health News & Cox Media Group
The Washington PostBreaking News Reporting
WINNER: Staff of Lookout Santa Cruz, California
FINALISTS:
Staff of the Honolulu Civil Beat
Staff of the Los Angeles TimesInvestigative Reporting
WINNER: Hannah Dreier of The New York Times
FINALISTS:
Casey Ross & Bob Herman of STAT
Staff of BloombergExplanatory Reporting
WINNER: Sarah Stillman of The New Yorker
FINALISTS:
Staff of Bloomberg
Staffs of The Texas Tribune, ProPublica, & FRONTLINELocal Reporting
WINNER: Sarah Conway of City Bureau & Trina Reynolds-Tyler of the Invisible Institute
FINALISTS:
Jerry Mitchell, Ilyssa Daly, Brian Howey, & Nate Rosenfield of Mississippi Today & The New York Times
Staff of The Villages Daily SunNational Reporting
WINNERS: Staff of Reuters
Staff of The Washington Post
FINALISTS:
Bianca Vázquez Toness & Sharon Lurye of Associated Press
Dave Philipps of The New York TimesInternational Reporting
WINNER: Staff of The New York Times
FINALISTS:
Julie Turkewitz & Federico Rios of The New York Times
Staff of The Washington PostFeature Writing
WINNER: Katie Engelhart, contributing writer, The New York Times
FINALISTS:
Jennifer Senior of The Atlantic
Keri Blakinger of The Marshall ProjectCommentary
WINNER: Vladimir Kara-Murza, contributor, The Washington Post
FINALISTS:
Brian Lyman of Alabama Reflector
Jay Caspian Kang of The New YorkerCriticism
WINNER: Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times
FINALISTS:
Vinson Cunningham of The New Yorker
Zadie Smith, contributor, The New York Review of BooksEditorial Writing
WINNER: David E. Hoffman of The Washington Post
FINALISTS:
Brandon McGinley & Rebecca Spiess of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Isadora Rangel of the Miami HeraldIllustrated Reporting & Commentary
WINNER: Medar de la Cruz, contributor, The New Yorker
FINALISTS:
Angie Wang, contributor, The New Yorker
Claire Healy, Nicole Dungca, & Ren Galeno, contributor, of The Washington Post
Clay Bennett of the Chattanooga Times Free PressBreaking News Photography
WINNER: Photography Staff of Reuters
FINALISTS:
Adem Altan of Agence France-Presse
Nicole S. Hester of The TennesseanFeature Photography
WINNER: Photography Staff of Associated Press
FINALISTS:
Hannah Reyes Morales, contributor, The New York Times
Nanna Heitmann, contributor, The New York TimesAudio Reporting
WINNER: Staffs of the Invisible Institute and USG Audio
FINALISTS:
Dan Slepian, Preeti Varathan, contributor, of NBC News
Lauren Chooljian, Alison Macadam, Jason Moon, Daniel Barrick, & Katie Colaneri of New Hampshire Public RadioLETTERS, DRAMA, & MUSIC
FICTION
WINNER: Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf)
FINALISTS:
Same Bed, Different Dreams by Ed Park (Random House)
Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)DRAMA
WINNER: Primary Trust by Eboni Booth
FINALISTS:
Here There Are Blueberries by Moisés Kaufman, Amanda Gronich
Public Obscenities by Shayok Misha ChowdhuryHISTORY
WINNER: No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era by Jacqueline Jones (Basic Books)
FINALISTS:
American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Radicals & the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century by Michael Willrich (Basic Books)
Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion by Elliott West (University of Nebraska Press)BIOGRAPHY
WINNERS: King: A Life by Jonathan Eig (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)
Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyon Woo (Simon & Schuster)
FINALIST:
Larry McMurtry: A Life by Tracy Daugherty (St. Martin’s Press)MEMOIR OR AUTOBIOGRAPHY
WINNER: Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice by Cristina Rivera Garza (Hogarth)
FINALISTS:
The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, & the Tragedy of Good Intentions by Jonathan Rosen (Penguin Press)
The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland (Penguin Press)POETRY
WINNER: Tripas: Poems by Brandon Som (Georgia Review Books)
FINALISTS:
Information Desk: An Epic by Robyn Schiff (Penguin Books)
To 2040 by Jorie Graham (Copper Canyon Press)GENERAL NONFICTION
WINNER: A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy by Nathan Thrall (Metropolitan Books)
FINALISTS:
Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara (St. Martin’s Press)
Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant (Knopf)MUSIC
WINNER: Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith) by Tyshawn Sorey
FINALISTS:
Double Concerto for Esperanza Spalding, Claire Chase, & large orchestra by Felipe Lara
Paper Pianos by Mary KouyoumdjianSpecial Citations
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Greg Tate (1957–2021)
Journalists & Media Workers Covering the War in Gaza
Brotherless Night, an ambitious novel about Sri Lankan civil war, wins $150K prize
MAY 13, 2024 9:10 PM ET
Andrew Limbong | NPR
The writer V. V. Ganeshananthan has won this year’s Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, for her novel Brotherless Night. This is the second year of the prize, which awards English-language writing by women and nonbinary authors. Winners of the award receive $150,000.
Brotherless Night centers on a young woman named Sashi, in 1981, who wants to become a doctor. But her dreams get upended as her family gets swept up in the conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the minority insurgent group known as the Tamil Tigers. “I was interested in writing about the gray space between militarized societies and questions of choice and coercion,” Ganeshananthan told WBUR’s Here & Now in a 2023 interview.
In a statement announcing the win, the prize jury called the book “ambitious and beautifully written,” and praised Ganeshananthan’s characters for asking readers to “consider how history is told, whom it serves, and the many truths it leaves out.”
The prize is named after Canadian Pulitzer-Prize winning author Carol Shields, who died in 2003. The first novel awarded last year was When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar. The money awarded is higher than most literary prizes. Winners of the Pulitzer Prize, for instance, receive $15,000. On top of the money, winners of the Carol Shields prize win a residency at the Fogo Island Inn, on the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.
The shortlisted books include Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, Daughter by Claudia Dey, Coleman Hill by Kim Coleman Foote, and A History of Burning by Janika Oza. Finalists will receive $12,500.
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