Retelling a classic story in your own style is a classic way of learning how te become a Great Writer. J.M. Coetzee has nothing left to prove in that area, with a Nobel prize and two Booker in his prize cabinet. Still, Coetzee rewrote the well known Crusoe story (after winning his 1st Booker prize) resulting in the novel ‘Foe’. Why? (more…)
If you would have to divide serious literary writing in two broad categories, style versus message would be a good one, the talented word magicians (Nabokov, Marquez, Flaubert) versus the socially committed (Hugo, Tolstoj, Allende), the writers’ writers versus the mass favorites. If you prefer the first over the latter, like the Zac, you have to admire the Tzumprize. The Tzumprize hands out a yearly award for the most eloquent sentence produced that year in the Dutch world of fiction. The prize is worth the number of words in euros. Last year was a record, with a winning sentence by Jeroen Brouwers .
Joseph Brodsky reminded us in his acceptance speech: “Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, so was Hitler; as for Mao, he even wrote verse. What all these men had in common, though, was that their hit list was longer than their reading list.” Literature’s power, like dynamite, depends on those who use it.
John Sutherland looks at past acceptance speeches in The Guardian
The British author Doris Lessing has won the 2007 Nobel prize for literature. Lessing, who is only the 11th woman to win literature’s most prestigious prize in its 106-year history, is best known for her 1962 postmodern feminist masterpiece, The Golden Notebook.
More on Doris Lessing at The Guardian
the Soviets’ persecution of Boris Pasternak, author of “Doctor Zhivago,” a Russian historian has injected a belated piece of intrigue: the CIA as covert financier of a Russian-language edition of the epic novel.
Read how this famous novel finally got published in its original language at The Wasington Post
The long-list for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize has never looked richer, or broader.
Read more on the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize at The Independent
Zacappa is beginning to look like a Christiaan Weijts’ fansite. But what to do when his great novel ART. 285B has won the prize for best literary newcomer in the Netherlands. Today it was announced that out of 100 books Art 285 B. has won the Anton Wachter prize.
Read the press release at Anton Wachter Prijs
In 1921, Pound [Ezra Pound] started up a fund called Bel Esprit and set about trying to persuade 30 subscribers to fork out ten pounds each: £300 p.a. would, he believed, enable Eliot [T.S.Eliot] to forsake his regular employment – employment which, as Pound saw it, represented ‘the greatest waste in ang. sax. letters at the moment’.
From Ian Hamilton on literary Prizes at LRB