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Alice Munro, Nobel literature winner revered as short story master, dead at 92
BY HILLEL ITALIE
Associated Press
Updated 1:08 PM EDT, May 14, 2024Nobel laureate Alice Munro, the Canadian literary giant who became one of the world’s most esteemed contemporary authors and one of history’s most honored short story writers, has died at age 92.
A spokesperson for publisher Penguin Random House Canada said Munro, winner of the Nobel literary prize in 2013, died Monday at home in Port Hope, Ontario. Munro had been in frail health for years and often spoke of retirement, a decision that proved final after the author’s 2012 collection, “Dear Life.”
Often ranked with Anton Chekhov, John Cheever, and a handful of other short story writers, Munro achieved stature rare for an art form traditionally placed beneath the novel. She was the first lifelong Canadian to win the Nobel and the first recipient cited exclusively for short fiction. Echoing the judgment of so many before, the Swedish academy pronounced her a “master of the contemporary short story” who could “accommodate the entire epic complexity of the novel in just a few short pages.”
Munro, little known beyond Canada until her late 30s, also became one of the few short story writers to enjoy ongoing commercial success. Sales in North America alone exceeded 1 million copies and the Nobel announcement raised “Dear Life” to the high end of The New York Times’ bestseller list for paperback fiction. Other popular books included “Too Much Happiness,” “The View from Castle Rock,” and “The Love of a Good Woman.”
Over a half century of writing, Munro perfected one of the greatest tricks of any art form: illuminating the universal through the particular, creating stories set around Canada that appealed to readers far away. She produced no single definitive work, but dozens of classics that were showcases of wisdom, technique and talent—her inspired plot twists and artful shifts of time and perspective; her subtle, sometimes cutting humor; her summation of lives in broad dimension and fine detail; her insights into people across age or background, her genius for sketching a character, like the adulterous woman introduced as “short, cushiony, dark-eyed, effusive. A stranger to irony.”
Her best known fiction included “The Beggar’s Maid,” a courtship between an insecure young woman and an officious rich boy who becomes her husband; “Corrie,” in which a wealthy young woman has an affair with an architect “equipped with a wife and young family”; and “The Moons of Jupiter,” about a middle-aged writer who visits her ailing father in a Toronto hospital and shares memories of different parts of their lives.
“I think any life can be interesting,” Munro said during a 2013 post-prize interview for the Nobel Foundation. “I think any surroundings can be interesting.”
Disliking Munro, as a writer or as a person, seemed almost heretical. The wide and welcoming smile captured in her author photographs was complemented by a down-to-earth manner and eyes of acute alertness, fitting for a woman who seemed to pull stories out of the air the way songwriters discovered melodies. She was admired without apparent envy, placed by the likes of Jonathan Franzen, John Updike, and Cynthia Ozick at the very top of the pantheon. Munro’s daughter, Sheila Munro, wrote a memoir in which she confided that “so unassailable is the truth of her fiction that sometimes I even feel as though I’m living inside an Alice Munro story.” Fellow Canadian author Margaret Atwood called her a pioneer for women, and for Canadians.
“Back in the 1950s and 60s, when Munro began, there was a feeling that not only female writers but Canadians were thought to be both trespassing and transgressing,” Atwood wrote in a 2013 tribute published in the Guardian after Munro won the Nobel. “The road to the Nobel wasn’t an easy one for Munro: the odds that a literary star would emerge from her time and place would once have been zero.”
Although not overtly political, Munro witnessed and participated in the cultural revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s and permitted her characters to do the same. She was a farmer’s daughter who married young, then left her husband in the 1970s and took to “wearing miniskirts and prancing around,” as she recalled during a 2003 interview with The Associated Press. Many of her stories contrasted the generation of Munro’s parents with the more open-ended lives of their children, departing from the years when housewives daydreamed “between the walls that the husband was paying for.”
Moviegoers would become familiar with “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the improbably seamless tale of a married woman with memory loss who has an affair with a fellow nursing home patient, a story further complicated by her husband’s many past infidelities. “The Bear” was adapted by director Sarah Polley into the feature film “Away From Her,” which brought an Academy Award nomination for Julie Christie. In 2014, Kristen Wiig starred in “Hateship, Loveship,” an adaptation of the story “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” in which a housekeeper leaves her job and travels to a distant rural town to meet up with a man she believes is in love with her—unaware the romantic letters she has received were concocted by his daughter and a friend.
Even before the Nobel, Munro received honors from around the English-language world, including Britain’s Man Booker International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award in the U.S., where the American Academy of Arts and Letters voted her in as an honorary member. In Canada, she was a three-time winner of the Governor General’s Award and a two-time winner of the Giller Prize.
Munro was a short story writer by choice, and, apparently, by design. Judith Jones, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf who worked with Updike and Anne Tyler, did not want to publish “Lives of Girls & Women,” her only novel, writing in an internal memo that “there’s no question the lady can write, but it’s also clear she is primarily a short story writer.”
Munro would acknowledge that she didn’t think like a novelist.
“I have all these disconnected realities in my own life, and I see them in other people’s lives,” she told the AP. “That was one of the problems, why I couldn’t write novels. I never saw things hanging together too well.”
Alice Ann Laidlaw was born in Wingham, Ontario, in 1931, and spent much of her childhood there, a time and place she often used in her fiction, including the four autobiographical pieces that concluded “Dear Life.” Her father was a fox farmer, her mother a teacher, and the family’s fortunes shifted between middle class and working poor, giving the future author a special sensitivity to money and class. Young Alice was often absorbed in literature, starting with the first time she was read Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” She was a compulsive inventor of stories and the “sort of child who reads walking upstairs and props a book in front of her when she does the dishes.”
A top student in high school, she received a scholarship to study at the University of Western Ontario, majoring in journalism as a “cover-up” for her pursuit of literature. She was still an undergraduate when she sold a story about a lonely teacher, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” to CBC Radio. She was also publishing work in her school’s literary journal.
One fellow student read “Dimensions” and wrote to the then-Laidlaw, telling her the story reminded him of Chekhov. The student, Gerald Fremlin, would become her second husband. Another fellow student, James Munro, was her first husband. They married in 1951, when she was only 20, and had four children, one of whom died soon after birth.
Settling with her family in Vancouver, Alice Munro wrote between trips to school, housework, and helping her husband at the bookstore that they co-owned and would turn up in some of her stories. She wrote one book in the laundry room of her house, her typewriter placed near the washer and dryer. Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and other writers from the American South inspired her, through their sense of place and their understanding of the strange and absurd.
Isolated from the literary center of Toronto, she did manage to get published in several literary magazines and to attract the attention of an editor at Ryerson Press (later bought out by McGraw Hill). Her debut collection, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” was released in 1968 with a first printing of just under 2,700 copies. A year later it won the Governor’s General Award and made Munro a national celebrity—and curiosity. “Literary Fame Catches City Mother Unprepared,” read one newspaper headline.
“When the book first came they sent me a half dozen copies. I put them in the closet. I didn’t look at them. I didn’t tell my husband they had come, because I couldn’t bear it. I was afraid it was terrible,” Munro told the AP. “And one night, he was away, and I forced myself to sit down and read it all the way through, and I didn’t think it was too bad. And I felt I could acknowledge it and it would be OK.”
By the early ’70s, she had left her husband, later observing that she was not “prepared to be a submissive wife.” Her changing life was best illustrated by her response to the annual Canadian census. For years, she had written down her occupation as “housewife.” In 1971, she switched to “writer.”
Over the next 40 years, her reputation and readership only grew, with many of her stories first appearing in The New Yorker. Her prose style was straightforward, her tone matter of fact, but her plots revealed unending disruption and disappointments: broken marriages, violent deaths, madness and dreams unfulfilled, or never even attempted. “Canadian Gothic” was one way she described the community of her childhood, a world she returned to when, in middle age, she and her second husband relocated to nearby Clinton.
“Shame and embarrassment are driving forces for Munro’s characters,” Atwood wrote, “just as perfectionism in the writing has been a driving force for her: getting it down, getting it right, but also the impossibility of that.”
She had the kind of curiosity that would have made her an ideal companion on a long train ride, imagining the lives of the other passengers. Munro wrote the story “Friend of My Youth,” in which a man has an affair with his fiancee’s sister and ends up living with both women, after an acquaintance told her about some neighbors who belonged to a religion that forbade card games. The author wanted to know more—about the religion, about the neighbors.
Even as a child, Munro had regarded the world as an adventure and mystery and herself as an observer, walking around Wingham and taking in the homes as if she were a tourist. In “The Peace of Utrecht,” an autobiographical story written in the late 1960s, a woman discovers an old high school notebook and remembers a dance she once attended with an intensity that would envelop her whole existence.
“And now an experience which seemed not at all memorable at the time,” Munro wrote, “had been transformed into something curiously meaningful for me, and complete; it took in more than the girls dancing and the single street, it spread over the whole town, its rudimentary pattern of streets and its bare trees and muddy yards just free of the snow, over the dirt roads where the lights of cars appeared, jolting toward the town, under an immense pale wash of sky.”
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Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck wins 2024 International Booker Prize
Erpenbeck is the first German writer and Michael Hofmann the first male translator to win the £50,000 prize for novel, which tells the story of a relationship set against the collapse of East Germany.Ella Creamer
The Guardian
Tue 21 May 2024 17.00 EDT
Jenny Erpenbeck and Michael Hofmann have won the 2024 International Booker Prize for Erpenbeck’s “personal and political” novel Kairos, translated by Hofmann from German.
Erpenbeck is the first German writer to win, while Hofmann is the first male translator to win. The £50,000 prize money will be split equally between the pair.
Kairos tells the story of a relationship set against the collapse of East Germany. The novel is a “richly textured evocation of a tormented love affair, the entanglement of personal and national transformations,” said judging chair and broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel.
Hofmann’s translation “captures the eloquence and eccentricities of Erpenbeck’s writing, the rhythm of its run-on sentences, the expanse of her emotional vocabulary,” she added.
Wachtel said the judging decision was reached with “considerable consensus,” and that the final judging conversation took half an hour. “I was actually surprised at the ultimate unanimity … this was the book that everyone turned to when it came to the crunch.”
Kairos is Erpenbeck’s fourth novel. Her second, The End of Days, won the Independent foreign fiction prize in 2015, which was the precursor to the International Booker Prize. Her third, Go, Went, Gone, was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2018.
Hofmann has also won the Independent foreign fiction prize—in 1995, for his translation of his father Gert Hofmann’s novel, The Film Explainer. He was a judge for the International Booker Prize in 2018, the year that Erpenbeck was previously longlisted.
“Kairos is one of the bleakest and most beautiful novels I have ever read,” wrote Natasha Walter in her Guardian review of the novel. “The dark nature of [the] relationship finds expression in Erpenbeck’s characteristically unyielding style. The novel is written in the present tense, a technique that can be flattening when used by lesser writers. In an elegant translation by Michael Hofmann, here it creates a claustrophobic intensity.”
The other books shortlisted for the prize were Not a River by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott; The Details by Ia Genberg, translated by Kira Josefsson; Mater 2–10 by Hwang Sok-yong, translated by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae; What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma, translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey; and Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior, translated by Johnny Lorenz.
Wachtel was joined on the judging panel by poet Natalie Diaz, novelist Romesh Gunesekera, visual artist William Kentridge, and writer, editor, and translator Aaron Robertson.
Previous winners of the prize include Han Kang and translator Deborah Smith for The Vegetarian, Olga Tokarczuk and translator Jennifer Croft for Flights, and Lucas Rijneveld and translator Michele Hutchison for The Discomfort of Evening. Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov and translator Angela Rodel won the 2023 prize for Time Shelter.
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Caleb Carr, author of The Alienist, dies at 68
Chloe Veltman
NPR
MAY 24, 2024 6:55 PM ET
Caleb Carr, the bestselling author of The Alienist who repeatedly mined the origins of violence in both his fiction and nonfiction works, has died. He was 68 years old.
Carr died from cancer at his home in upstate New York on Thursday, according to his publicist, Katharine Myers.
His 1994 period thriller The Alienist investigates the murders of young male prostitutes in the late nineteenth century. His 2002 nonfiction book about terrorism The Lessons of Terror was written in response to the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.
“Idiosyncratic, brilliant, and soft-hearted, Caleb was a constant in my life for decades, as a longtime client and friend since high school,” said Carr’s agent Suzanne Gluck in a statement shared with NPR. “In his books, he used his pain to shed light on the darkest places of the human mind.”
Carr was born in 1955 in Manhattan, N.Y. and had a chaotic childhood. His parents divorced when he was young. He had a violent and abusive father who was prone to drink and regularly lashed out at his son.
In his recent memoir My Beloved Monster, Carr wrote about finding solace in his friendships with cats.
“It’s a distinctly different kind of companionship than you get from any other animal,” Carr said in an April interview for NPR. “But once you accept it on their terms, it’s really amazing.”
Carr’s book focuses specifically on his beloved cat Masha, the author’s constant companion for the last 17 years of his life. The pair struggled with cancer together.
“She made it possible for me to survive,” Carr told NPR. “I like to think, I hope, that I did the same for her.”
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VV Ganeshananthan & Naomi Klein win Women’s prizes for fiction and nonfiction
Judges praised Klein’s Doppelganger for its “courageous” study of truth in politics and called Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night a “masterpiece” of historical fiction.
Lucy Knight
The Guardian
Thu 13 Jun 2024 14:13 EDTDoppelganger by Guardian US columnist Naomi Klein has become the inaugural winner of the Women’s prize for nonfiction, while Brotherless Night by VV Ganeshananthan has been named winner of the fiction prize.
Both books look at how people get swept up in extremism: Doppelganger uses the fact that Klein is regularly confused with feminist turned conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf as a jumping off point for an exploration of truth in politics, discussing populist figures such as Steve Bannon and Donald Trump. Meanwhile Brotherless Night, mostly set in Jaffna during the Sri Lankan civil war, is about a girl who dreams of becoming a doctor before war breaks out in her country and those around her begin to engage with violent political ideologies.
Historian Suzannah Lipscomb, who chaired the nonfiction judging panel, described Doppelganger as a “brilliant and layered analysis” that “demonstrates humor, insight, and expertise.” She and her fellow judges, writer Kamila Shamsie, fair fashion campaigner Venetia La Manna, writer and academic Nicola Rollock, and biographer Anne Sebba, admired Klein’s “both deeply personal and impressively expansive” writing. “Doppelganger is a courageous, humane, and optimistic call-to-arms,” she added, “that moves us beyond black and white, beyond right and left, inviting us instead to embrace the spaces in between.”
“There’s a debate to be had about how liberals and leftists should relate to those drawn into the ecosystem of Wolf, Bannon, and Trump,” William Davies wrote in his Guardian review of Klein’s winning book. “Doppelganger leans towards understanding more and condemning less, without ever romanticizing those beholden to conspiracy theories.”
American author Ganeshananthan’s second novel—her first, Love Marriage, was longlisted for the 2009 Women’s prize, then known as the Orange prize—is “an unforgettable account of a country and a family coming undone,” according to Guardian reviewer Yagnishsing Dawoor.
Chair of the fiction judging panel, novelist Monica Ali, described Brotherless Night as “a masterpiece of historical fiction.”
Ali, who judged alongside writer Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, author and illustrator Laura Dockrill, actor Indira Varma, and presenter and author Anna Whitehouse, called Ganeshananthan’s novel “brilliant, compelling, and deeply moving,” praising the way it “bears witness to the intimate and epic-scale tragedies of the Sri Lankan civil war.”
Brotherless Night beat The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright, Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville, Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad, Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy, and River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure.
Shortlisted alongside Doppelganger were Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art & Life & Sudden Death, Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place, Tiya Miles’s All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, Madhumita Murgia’s Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI, and Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir. Klein will win £30,000 and a limited-edition artwork known as the “Charlotte,” both gifted by the Charlotte Aitken Trust, while Ganeshananthan will also receive £30,000, anonymously endowed, and the “Bessie,” a bronze statuette created by the artist Grizel Niven.
The Women’s prize for fiction, which is now in its 29th year, describes itself as “the greatest celebration of female creativity in the world.” It was set up in 1995, in the wake of an all-male Booker prize shortlist in 1991. The nonfiction prize was announced last year, after research commissioned by the Women’s Prize Trust found that female nonfiction writers are less likely to be reviewed or win prizes than their male counterparts.
The Women’s prize for fiction has been won by authors including Zadie Smith, Ali Smith, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Last year’s winner was Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.
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Indian Government to Prosecute Arundhati Roy
BY MARION WINIK | 6/21/24 | NPR
Under the provisions of a controversial anti-terrorism law, the Indian government is set to institute legal proceedings against novelist Arundhati Roy for comments she made more than a decade ago, according to the Guardian.
In the 2010 comments in question, Roy said that the disputed territory of Kashmir is not an “integral” part of India. This caused her critics, and now the Delhi government of Narendra Modi, to assert that she was advocating secession of Kashmir.
At 62, Roy is one of India’s best known and most acclaimed authors; her 1997 novel, The God of Small Things, was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize. A Kirkus critic called it a “truly spectacular debut.”
Roy followed that book with just one other novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), devoting the bulk of her attention to human rights and environmental causes and publishing nonfiction books including Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2014).
Last Friday, the top official in the Delhi administration, V.K. Saxena, confirmed that the case will move forward. Roy and former political analyst Sheikh Showkat Hussain, both outspoken critics of the government, face prosecution together.
According to author and journalist Siddhartha Deb, quoted in Democracy Now, “This case is so convoluted, it’s hard to say where it begins and where it ends—and that’s the point. The process is the punishment.”
Marion Winik hosts NPR’s The Weekly Reader podcast.
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Steven Spielberg to Produce Adaptation of James
BY MARION WINIK | 6/21/24 | NPR
Universal Pictures has acquired the rights to Percival Everett’s bestselling novel James, according to an announcement in Variety. Stephen Spielberg will executive produce the project through Amblin Entertainment and the author himself will write the screenplay.
World of Reel also reports the hiring of Australian filmmaker Taika Waititi to direct; Waititi won an Oscar for his Jojo Rabbit screenplay and is currently directing the screen adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara & the Sun. He was also the director of Next Goal Wins and Thor: Ragnarok.
James is Everett’s reworking of Mark Twain’s classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, the enslaved character who rafts the Mississippi with Huck. The novel was published in March to rave reviews and became a New York Times bestseller. In a starred review, a Kirkus reviewer wrote “One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.”
Everett, who has published more than 35 books since 1983 and was the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle in 2021, moved from cult status into the limelight with the success of the film American Fiction, based on his 2001 novel, Erasure.
There is no word yet on casting for the James adaptation.
Marion Winik hosts NPR’s The Weekly Reader podcast.
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Rules of Engagement Adaptation in the Works
BY MICHAEL SCHAUB • JUNE 17, 2024
Stacey Abrams’s Rules of Engagement is headed to the big screen, Deadline reports.
The romantic thriller novel by the Georgia politician, written under her pen name Selena Montgomery, was originally published in 2001 and reissued in 2022 by Berkley. The book tells the story of Dr. Raleigh Foster, a chemist who works for a multinational intelligence agency and infiltrates a terrorist organization. A critic for Kirkus called the novel “a slow-burn romantic suspense story [that] eventually finds its footing.”
The screenplay for the film will be written by Meredith Dawson, who previously wrote for the miniseries Four Weddings and a Funeral. Among the movie’s producers will be Abrams and actor Kerry Washington (Scandal, Little Fires Everywhere).
As of 2021, two television projects based on Abrams’s books were in development: a series adaptation of her novel While Justice Sleeps and another series based on her novel Never Tell.
Screenwriter Dawson shared news of the Rules of Engagement adaptation on Instagram in a post referencing Abrams’s voting advocacy. “HOLY MOLY I feel very honored and privileged to be adapting Stacey’s novel!!!!!” she wrote. “She is as much of an unstoppable force in person as she is on the page. WOW DO DREAMS COME TRUE???? … This is gonna be cool and fun and remember …. When there is [a] long wait to see this movie in theaters: if you’re in line, stay in line.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
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New Memoir by Hillary Clinton Coming in September
BY MARION WINIK • JUNE 25, 2024
Hillary Clinton will release a new memoir in September, according to the Washington Post.
Simon & Schuster announced the publication of Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, & Liberty, billing it as “Hillary like you haven’t seen her before.”
Slated to hit shelves on Sept. 17, the book offers a “warning to all American voters,” along with Clinton’s “unvarnished views on politics, democracy, the threats we face, and the future within our reach,” according to the publisher.
“The book reads like you’re sitting down with your smartest, funniest, most passionate friend over a long meal,” said Simon & Schuster editor in chief Priscilla Painton in a news release.
The personal topics addressed include the Clinton marriage, now in its 50th year; the author’s friendships; and the aging process. On the political side, Clinton offers insights on Vladimir Putin and Russia as well as the upcoming presidential election. She describes her experiences ranging from canoeing with a former Nazi who wants to deprogram white supremacists to evacuating women from Afghanistan at the end of the war there.
Something Lost, Something Gained is Clinton’s 11th book, including two children’s books co-written with daughter Chelsea and State of Terror, a collaboration with mystery novelist Louise Penny. Her previous memoir, What Happened, an account of the 2016 election, sold 300,000 copies in its first week.
Clinton, who plans to narrate the audiobook of Something Lost, Something Gained, will tour major U.S. cities in support of the book.
She’ll probably just be getting home when her husband releases his own memoir this fall. Citizen, which delves into Bill Clinton’s post-presidential life, will be published by Knopf on Nov. 19.
Marion Winik hosts NPR’s The Weekly Reader podcast.
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Hisham Matar wins Orwell prize for political fiction
The Pulitzer winner’s third novel My Friends is based on an event from 1984, when officials opened fire on protesters at the Libyan embassy in London.Ella Creamer
The Guardian
Thu 27 Jun 2024 16.30 EDT
Pulitzer prize winner Hisham Matar has won this year’s Orwell prize for political fiction for his third novel My Friends, which follows three Libyan exiles in London.
Matthew Longo won the nonfiction counterpart—the Orwell prize for political writing—for The Picnic, about a group of Hungarian activists who staged a pan-European summer party near the militarized Austrian border in August 1989. During the picnic, 600 East Germans breached the border unhindered by guards—an event which came to be seen as a catalyst for the fall of the Berlin wall.
Longo and Matar, who will each receive £3,000, were announced as the winners at a ceremony at Conway Hall in London on Thursday evening.
At the heart of My Friends is a real-life event from 1984, when officials opened fire on protesters at the Libyan embassy in London. “Matar’s response to those gunshots is a richly sustained meditation on exile and friendship, love and distance, deepening with each page as layers of recollection and experience accrue,” said writer Alexandra Harris, who chaired the political fiction judging panel.
Matar introduces his characters “into historical tableaux, thereby giving those public events the immediacy of personal experience,” wrote Lucy Hughes-Hallett in a Guardian review of the novel.
Joining Harris on the political fiction prize panel were novelists Simon Okotie and Ross Raisin and academic Lara Choksey.
Choosing the political writing prize winner was “incredibly difficult,” said Peter Frankopan, who chaired the nonfiction judging panel. Their final choice, The Picnic, “focuses on the way that communist rule over much of central and eastern Europe unraveled in the summer of 1989.
“Many thought that if change came to this region, it would come through conflict and warfare. Yet it was an innocuous picnic that caused the winds of change to blow—and to transform Europe and beyond. Beautifully written and relying on oral sources, The Picnic reads like a thriller.”
Alongside Frankopan on the political writing prize judging panel was British Future think tank director Sunder Katwala, journalist Christina Lamb, writer Lola Seaton, and former Downing Street aide Rohan Silva.
“The Picnic is a brisk and engaging account, told in a lively blend of novelistic narration and reportage and featuring interviews with a number of people closely involved in these historic events,” wrote Houman Barekat in a Guardian review of the book.
The Picnic is Longo’s second book; his first book, The Politics of Borders, was published in 2017. He is an assistant professor of political science at Leiden University.
Matar won the Pulitzer Prize for biography or autobiography in 2017 for his memoir, The Return, chronicling the writer’s journey to try to discover what had happened to his father, who was kidnapped by Gaddafi’s agents when Matar was 19. His debut novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the 2006 Booker prize.
Other finalists for the political writing prize included Revolutionary Acts by Jason Okundaye, Eve by Cat Bohannon, and The Achilles Trap by Steve Coll. Finalists for the political fiction prize included Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan, James by Percival Everett, and Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan.
Previous winners of the political fiction prize include Ali Smith, Colson Whitehead, and Claire Keegan, while previous political writing prize winners include Patrick Radden Keefe and Sally Hayden.
In 2023, two debut books won the prizes: Peter Apps’s Show Me the Bodies, an account of the policy decisions leading up to the Grenfell Tower fire, and Tom Crewe’s The New Life, which dramatizes the struggle to change Britain’s laws related to homosexuality in the 1890s.
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Novelist Ismail Kadare Dies at 88
BY MICHAEL SCHAUB • July 1, 2024
Ismail Kadare, the celebrated author whose books took on political oppression in his native Albania, died Monday at 88, the New York Times reports.
Kadare was born in the Albanian city of Gjirokastër in 1936; he was a child when the country was occupied by Italy, which ran the nation for six years before it was taken over by a totalitarian communist dictatorship. He lived in Albania for decades before defecting to Paris in 1990.
He wrote poetry and fiction before making his literary breakthrough in 1963 with the novel The General of the Dead Army. Several more books would follow, many criticizing the Albanian government, including The Palace of Dreams, The Concert, and Agamemnon’s Daughter. In 2005, he became the first writer ever to win the International Booker Prize, at the time given to an author in recognition of their complete body of work.
His most recent book to be published in English, A Dictator Calls, translated by John Hodgson, was released last year and longlisted for the International Booker Prize.
The Associated Press reports that Albanian President Bajram Begaj said in a statement, “Albania and Albanians lost their genius of letters, their spiritual emancipator, the Balkans [lost] the poet of its myths, Europe and the world [lost] one of the most renowned representatives of modern literature.”
Kadare’s admirers paid tribute to him on social media. On the platform X, professor Elidor Mëhilli wrote, “Farewell Ismail Kadare: Your books were rare mental exit windows in tragic, dark, inhumane times. One of the last of his kind in East Central Europe. Hard to convey to outsiders what he meant to generations of us. No obituary can do you justice. You live in our imagination.”
And Vjosa Osmani, the president of Kosovo, posted, “Through his works, he fearlessly championed the Albanian language, culture, as well as the right of the people of Kosovo to live in freedom. Our hearts go out to his family and to all who cherished our giant’s remarkable legacy.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
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Judges for the International Booker Prize Revealed
BY MICHAEL SCHAUB • JULY 10, 2024
The International Booker Prize, given annually to a work of fiction translated into English and published in the U.K. or Ireland, has revealed the lineup of judges for its 2025 award.
Chairing the jury for next year’s prize is Max Porter, author of the novels Grief Is the Thing With Feathers and Shy. His novel Lanny was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize.
Translator Anton Hur, who was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize alongside author Bora Chung for Cursed Bunny, will also serve as a judge for the award, as will Beth Orton, the folk/electronica singer-songwriter known for albums including Trailer Park and Daybreaker.
Poet and director Caleb Femi and literary magazine editor Sana Goyal round out the judging panel.
Jury chair Porter said in a statement, “We have a dream team of judges, people I trust and admire and want to spend time with. We gather not as experts to impose our opinions, but as readers, to recommend books. To unpack and discuss them, to test them against the worlds we live in and listen to the questions they ask of us.”
The International Booker Prize was first awarded in 2005. Past winners include Flights, written by Olga Tokarczuk and translated by Jennifer Croft, and Kairos, written by Jenny Erpenbeck and translated by Michael Hofmann.
The longlist for next year’s prize will be revealed on Feb. 25, 2025, with the shortlist following on April 8. The winner of the award will be announced on May 20 in a ceremony at the Tate Modern in London.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
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Unpublished Zora Neale Hurston Book Coming in 2025
BY MICHAEL SCHAUB • JULY 12, 2024
A previously unpublished novel by legendary author Zora Neale Hurston is coming in 2025.
Amistad will publish Hurston’s The Life of Herod the Great next year. The press says the book reveals “the historical Herod the Great—not the villain the Bible makes him out to be but a religious and philosophical man who lived a life of valor and vision.”
Hurston grew up in Alabama and Florida, and studied anthropology at Barnard College. Her studies and fieldwork informed many of her books, including Mules & Men, Tell My Horse, and her most famous work, Their Eyes Were Watching God.
She died in 1960, and 15 years later, an essay by Alice Walker, “Looking for Zora,” rekindled interest in her work. Several of her books have been published posthumously, including Barracoon and Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories From the Harlem Renaissance.
The Life of Herod the Great tells the story of the first-century Judean king who, according to the book of Matthew, ordered the Massacre of the Innocents, in which male children were slaughtered in and around Bethlehem. Historians do not believe the massacre actually occurred.
“In Hurston’s retelling, Herod is not the wicked ruler of the New Testament who is charged with the ‘slaughter of the innocents,’ but the forerunner of Christ—a beloved king who enriched Jewish culture and brought prosperity and peace to Judea,” Amistad says.
The Life of Herod the Great will be published with an introduction and afterword by scholar Deborah Plant. It is slated for publication on Jan. 7, 2025.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
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Alice Munro’s daughter says her mother did nothing to stop abusive stepfather
JULY 8, 2024 4:07 PM ET
NPR
Jaclyn Diaz
The daughter of renowned Canadian author Alice Munro has revealed that she suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather and that her mother, a Nobel Prize winner, turned a blind eye to it.
In an op-ed published Sunday in the Toronto Star, Andrea Skinner wrote that Munro’s husband at the time, Gerald Fremlin, started abusing her in 1976 when she was 9 years old.
She wrote that she was visiting her mother that summer at her home in Clinton, Ontario, when, while Munro was away, Fremlin “climbed into the bed where I was sleeping and sexually assaulted me.”
Munro died earlier this summer at the age of 92. The author was best known for her short stories, often placing her characters in rural Ontario—where Munro grew up. She was called the “master of the contemporary short story” by the Swedish Academy that awarded her the Nobel in 2013.
Since Skinner’s op-ed was published, the literary world has expressed shock and sorrow, with authors publicly grappling with the formative work of Munro with the impact of her daughter’s allegations.
Rebecca Makkai, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Great Believers, posted on X of Munro and the allegations, “I love her work so much that I don’t want to lose it, but am also horrified to see the meanings of many favorite (foundational, to me) stories shift under us.”
Skinner said she is coming forward now because she wants her story “to become part of the stories people tell about my mother. I never wanted to see another interview, biography, or event that didn’t wrestle with the reality of what had happened to me, and with the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser.”
Skinner said the abuse continued for years, with Fremlin often exposing himself to Skinner, telling the young girl about her mother’s sexual needs and the “little girls in the neighborhood” that he told her he liked.
Skinner confided in her stepmother, who told James Munro, Skinner’s father. James Munro did not confront his ex-wife about the abuse, and the assault continued with no adult intervention, Skinner wrote.
The abuse, and the heavy secret and silence she was forced to keep, took a drastic toll on Skinner, who developed debilitating migraines and bulimia as an adult. When she was 25, she wrote a letter to Munro, finally coming forward about the abuse.
Munro told her she felt betrayed and likened the abuse to an affair, a response that devastated Skinner, she wrote.
In response, Fremlin wrote letters to Munro and the family, threatening to kill Skinner if she ever went to the police. He blamed Skinner for the abuse and described her as a child as a “home wrecker.” He also threatened to expose photos he took of Skinner when she was a girl.
Munro went back to Fremlin and stayed with him until he died in 2013, Skinner wrote. Munro allegedly said “that she had been ‘told too late,’ she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men. She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her,” Skinner wrote in her essay.
In 2005, Skinner could stay quiet no longer. She reported Fremlin, who was 80 at the time, to police in Ontario, using letters he sent to the family as evidence. He pleaded guilty to one count of indecent assault and received a suspended sentence and probation for two years.
Skinner said she never reconciled with her mother, but has since rebuilt a relationship with her siblings.
Munro’s Books, the company that Alice and James Munro started together when they were married, issued a statement of support for Skinner. The company has been independently owned since 2014 and wasn’t speaking on behalf of the family.
The company said, “Learning the details of Andrea’s experience has been heartbreaking for all of us here at Munro’s Books. Along with so many readers and writers, we will need time to absorb this news and the impact it may have on the legacy of Alice Munro, whose work and ties to the store we have previously celebrated. It is important to respect Andrea’s choices over how her story is shared more widely.”
The statement continued, “This story is Andrea’s to tell, and we will not be commenting further at this time.”
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Scotiabank Giller Prize Jurors Resign in Protest
BY MICHAEL SCHAUB • JULY 18, 2024
Two authors have withdrawn from the Giller Prize jury in protest of sponsor Scotiabank’s investment in an Israeli weapons manufacturer, the Canadian Press news agency reports.
Dinaw Mengestu (All Our Names, the forthcoming Someone Like Us) and Megha Majumdar (A Burning) resigned from the judging panel for the award, given annually to a work of fiction by a Canadian author. The other jurors for the prize are journalist Noah Richler, novelist Kevin Chong, and singer Molly Johnson.
Earlier this month, a group of Canadian authors—some eligible for this year’s prize, and some previous winners—published an open letter to the Giller Foundation condemning Scotiabank’s investment in Elbit Systems, a Haifa-based defense contractor, Literary Hub reports.
“As long as the Giller Foundation continues to receive funding from ANY sponsors who are directly invested in Israel’s occupation of Palestine, it will still be complicit in genocide,” the authors wrote in the letter withdrawing their books from contention for the prize. The letter was co-signed by authors who have previously won or been shortlisted or longlisted for the prize, including winners David Bergen, Noor Naga, Sarah Bernstein, and Omar El Akkad.
In an interview with the CBC, El Akkad said, “I think of what the Palestinian poet Rasha Abdulhadi said about anything you can do to throw sand in the gears of genocide, you should do it. And in that context, trying to pressure this award to break with a company that is investing in an Israeli weapons maker makes perfect sense.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
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Three British novelists make Booker 2024 longlist among “cohort of global voices”
Hisham Matar, Sarah Perry. and Samantha Harvey in running for prize, along with the first Native American and Dutch authors ever to be nominated.Ella Creamer
The Guardian
Tue 30 Jul 2024 09.00 EDT
Percival Everett, Hisham Matar, and Sarah Perry are among the 13 novelists longlisted for the 2024 Booker prize. The “Booker dozen” also features works by Richard Powers, Tommy Orange, Rachel Kushner, and Anne Michaels.
This year’s “glorious” list comprises “a cohort of global voices, strong voices, and new voices,” said judging chair and artist Edmund de Waal.
Everett was longlisted for James, which reimagines Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. The judging panel, which is made up Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan, novelists Sara Collins and Yiyun Li, and musician Nitin Sawhney, alongside de Waal, said Everett’s 24th novel “stands as a towering achievement,” James “confronts the past while holding out hope for a progressive future, cementing Everett’s deserved reputation as a literary sensation,” they added.
Everett is one of six Americans on this year’s longlist. Orange, who is the first Native American to be nominated, has been selected for his second novel, Wandering Stars, a multigenerational saga exploring addiction, displacement, trauma, and identity.
Powers was longlisted for his novel Playground, out in September, partly set on the island of Makatea in French Polynesia where residents prepare to vote on a proposal to send floating cities out into the open sea. Meanwhile, another forthcoming title, Kushner’s Creation Lake, follows an American woman sent to remote France to infiltrate an activist commune.
Three British novelists made the longlist of 13: Matar, Perry, and Samantha Harvey. Perry’s fourth novel, Enlightenment, is a “long and quiet book” that “brings together a compression of place—a small town in 1990s Essex—and an exhilarating exploration of the heavens, comets, faith, ghosts, love,” said the judges. Harvey was longlisted for Orbital, which follows a day in the life of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station.
British-Libyan author Matar’s novel My Friends is about three friends living in political exile and centers on a real-life event from 1984, when gunmen opened fire on protesters at the Libyan embassy in London.
The longlist contains “timely and timeless fiction, in which there is much at stake,” said de Waal. “Here are books that unfold with quietness and stealth, as well as books that are incendiary. There are books that navigate what it means to belong, to be displaced, and to return.”
Michaels, whose 1997 novel Fugitive Pieces won the Guardian fiction award, was longlisted for Held, a novel that “transported” every member of the judging panel. Michaels writes “about war, trauma, science, faith, and above all, love and human connection; her canvas is a century of busy history, but she connects the fragments of her story through theme and image rather than character and chronology, intense moments surrounded by great gaps of space and time,” the judges said.
Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot—a story of eight female teenage boxers told over a two-day championship—was one of three debuts that made the list. Yael van der Wouden, who is the first Dutch author to be longlisted for the Booker, was put forward for The Safekeep, while Irish writer Colin Barrett was nominated for Wild Houses.
Completing the longlist are This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud, who previously made the list in 2006, and Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, the first Australian to be longlisted in eight years.
The longlisted titles are not “books ‘about issues’,” said de Waal. “They are works of fiction that inhabit ideas by making us care deeply about people and their predicaments, their singularity in a world that can be indifferent or hostile.”
This year’s Booker prize was open to works published between 1 October 2023 and 30 September 2024. When the prize was first awarded in 1969, it was open to Commonwealth writers, but from 2014 onward, writers of any nationality were allowed to be entered. Books must be written originally in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland to be eligible.
The shortlist for the £50,000 prize will be revealed on 16 September, and the winner will be announced on 12 November. Recent recipients include Douglas Stuart, Shehan Karunatilaka, Damon Galgut, and the 2019 co-winners Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood. Last year, Paul Lynch won the prize for his novel Prophet Song.
Earlier this year, Radio 1Xtra host Richie Brave urged the Booker prize to consider changing its name because of its links to enslavement. Brave’s ancestors were enslaved by the founders of the company that originally sponsored the prize.
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