IMPAC Award Longlist is really LONG

The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is the largest and most international literary prize, with libraries from around the world nominating books which can be written in any language.

As a result, this award's longlist is reaaaaally long. 162 titles are represented from 43 countries.

Congratulations to our own Library member Colum McCann for his nomination for Let the Great World Spin...The IMPAC's shortlist will be named on April 12.

Tom Wolfe. Award Winner.

Congratulations to member Tom Wolfe who has been named the winner of the National Book Foundation’s 2010 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Past winners of the medal have included Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, Toni Morrison, and our own NYSL member Joan Didion. Tom Wolfe will receive his award at the National Book Awards ceremony on November 17.

{from the news report in Publishers Weekly}

Synchronicity

Yesterday, the Library's new exhibit Literary Lives: The World of Francis Steegmuller and Shirley Hazzard opened to great fanfare. Today, Shirley Hazzard's The Bay of Noon was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize, to recognize books published in 1970 that were not eligible for consideration for the Booker. A coincidence, for sure.
















But here's the really interesting part: Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat was also on the Lost Man Booker shortlist. If you've read curator Harriet Shapiro's interview with Shirley Hazzard (published in the excellent exhibition catalog), then you also know that Muriel Spark was the one who introduced Shirley and Francis, and the rest is history, as they say.

Lost Man Booker Prize for Hazzard?

The Library's own Shirley Hazzard is on the longlist for the Lost Man Booker Prize for the best omitted novel of 1970! These are novels that missed out on being named to the Booker longlist due to rule changes in 1971.

Ms. Hazzard has been nominated for The Bay of Noon, her beautiful and evocative novel about a young woman who flees to Naples to escape her past.

The shortlist will be announced in March, and the reading public will decide the winner by voting on the Man Booker Prize website. The winner will be announced in May.

Winners...we love winners

especially when they're associated with us in some way.

Congratulations to member Kekla Magoon, who was recently awarded the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Author Award for her book The Rock and the River. The Steptoe New Talent Award is given to a black author or illustrator each year to "affirm new talent and to offer visibility to excellence in writing."

Congratulations Kekla!