Awards

Author and The Rachel Maddow Show host Rachel Maddow has won the John Steinbeck Award.

Previous recipients included Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, Arthur Miller, Studs Terkel and Garrison Keillor. Maddow is the third woman to receive the prestigious award and the first recipient under the age of 40.

Thomas Steinbeck, son of the great John Steinbeck, had this statement in the release: “My father would have adored Rachel Maddow … Listening to Rachel Maddow is like listening to Walter Cronkite. We have that kind of trust in her. When I watch Rachel Maddow, I feel like I’m part of an alliance. I hope she’s in it for the long haul, because we really need her.”

Read more

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

The film adaptation of Katheryn Stockett‘s The Help took three awards at the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards last night, including Best Ensemble Cast.

Follow this link for the full list of winners. Lead actress Viola Davis and supporting actress Octavia Spencer (both pictured, via) also won SAG Awards for their roles as Aibileen Clark and Minny Jackson. Spencer recently received the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress.

Both Davis and Spencer have been nominated for Academy Awards. The Envelope had this quote from Spencer: “I love taking men home. I would be lying if I didn’t say to you I would love to win an Oscar. But we have a group of brilliantly talented actresses, and it’s not a foregone conclusion that because I’ve won these [awards] then I’ll win [the Oscar].” (Via The L.A. Times)

After the Harry Potter franchise was not nominated for Best Picture this year, Huffington Post writer Linda Kenney Baden suggested that fans of the boy wizard consider boycotting the Academy Awards.

Here’s an excerpt: “Enough already Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences– start nominating movies that are terrific — no matter the genre. Some of the nominated movies are boring, unwatchable, obtuse or totally uninteresting to moviegoers and not just the youth audience that makes up 80 percent of the cinema going public … Is it time for the movie public — the viewers — to engage in a national TV boycott?”

Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows Part 2 received three nominations for this year’s Academy Awards: Best Art Direction, Best Makeup and Best Visual Effects.

Read more

British author Andrew Miller has won the Costa Book of the Year for 2012 for his novel Pure, a fictional story set just before the French Revolution. Europa Editions will publish the book in June.

Miller topped four other authors for the win, including Matthew Hollis (who was nominated for his biography of poet Edward Thomas).

Miller will receive a prize of 30,000 pounds, about $46,760. Miller told reporters at the event that he planned to use the money to live off of. The Telegraph UK had this quote: “‘It’s not as if writers tend to be particularly wealthy people. I certainly have no private income. What money we raise through events like this we pay the mortgage I’m afraid, we live off it.’”

For the second year in a row, Washington DC has been named America’s most literate city. New York City has moved up to the 22nd place on Central Conneticut State University’s annual list.

Here’s more about the study that began in 2003: “Drawing from a variety of available data resources, the America’s Most Literate Cities study ranks the largest cities (population 250,000 and above) in the United States. This study focuses on six key indicators of literacy: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources.”

We’ve listed the top ten most literate cities below–what do you think? (Via Publishers Weekly)

Read more

Martin Scorsese‘s award winning adaptation of The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick has lead the Academy Award nominations this year, earning 11 Oscar nominations.

We’ve embedded the trailer above–what did you think of the film? Earlier this year, we wrote about Selznick’s personalized tours of the American Museum of Natural History.

The Best Picture nominees included a host of adapted novels. Below, we’ve linked to free samples of books adapted into Best Picture-nominated films.

Read more

Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos has won the prestigious John Newbery Medal at the American Library Association’s annual youth media awards.

A Ball for Daisy illustrated and written by Chris Raschka won the Randolph Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book for children. In addition, the Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in literature written for young adults went to Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley.

Finally the Coretta Scott King (Author) Book Award recognizing an African American author and illustrator of outstanding books for children and young adults: went to  Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans, written and illustrated by Kadir Nelson. The rest of the ALA winners follow below…

Read more

The National Book Critics Circle have announced the finalists for its 2011 publishing awards.

Teju Cole, Alan Hollinghurst and Jeffrey Eugenides are among the finalists in the fiction category. Manning Marable and John Lewis Gaddis made the finalist list for biography. Diane Ackerman and Luis J. Rodríguez are finalists for autobiography. Poetry nominees include: Laura Kasischke, Yusef Komunyakaa and Aracelis Girmay. Follow this link to see the complete list of finalists and their works.

In addition, Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, won the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and Kathryn Schulz won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

Read more

Singapore-based Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka has won the 2nd annual DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. The award comes with a $50,000 cash prize.

In February 2011 Karunatilaka made his authorial debut with Chinaman, a novel published by Random House, India. Prior to this publication, Karunatilaka had written advertisements, rock songs and travel stories.

The prize’s shortlist included five other titles: Bharathipura by U.R. Ananthamurthy (translated by Susheela Punitha), A Street in Srinagar by Chandrakanta (translated by Manisha Chaudhry), Monkey-man by Usha K.R, The Thing About Thugs by Tabish Khair and The Story that Must Not Be Told by Kavery Nambisan.

Read more

Looking for a great mystery?

Below, we’ve created a special literary mixtape linking to free samples of books nominated for the 2012 Edgar Awards–the Mystery Writers of America’s newly revealed picks for the best books of the year.

The winners will be revealed at a banquet ceremony on April 26, 2012 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City.

Read more