Awards

Orange Prize for Fiction co-founder Kate Mosse revealed today that the mobile phone company Orange will end its sponsorship of the U.K. literary award that bears its name.

The Prize for Fiction carries a £30,000 award, and winners receive a bronze figurine nicknamed the “Bessie.” Follow this link to read a list of the 2012 shortlist–the winner will be revealed on May 30th. Here’s more from Mosse:

On behalf of everyone on the Prize for Fiction Women’s Committee, I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the hard work of all those at Orange, past and present, for their investment, passion, support and never ending enthusiasm. This is the end of an era, but no major arts project should stand still. We are very much looking forward to developing the Prize for the future and working with a new sponsor to ensure the Prize grows and plays an even more significant part in the years to come. We are in active discussions with a number of potential new brand partners and look forward to the start of another exciting chapter for the Prize.

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Hailey Leithauser has won the Poetry Foundation’s 2012 Emily Dickinson First Book Award. The 57-year-old poet has been writing off and on since the late 1970s. Since 2000, her work has been published in The Antioch Review, The Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Best American Poetry, and Poetry.

The award, which is given only occasionally, was designed to give recognition to an American poet over the age of forty who has yet to publish a collection of poetry. Leithauser’s first book-length poetry manuscript, Swoop, comes out in October 2013 from Graywolf Press. As the award recipient, Leithauser wins $10,000 and will also be honored at the Pegasus Awards ceremony at the Poetry Foundation on Monday, June 11.

Jeff Shotts, poetry editor at Graywolf, describes Leithauser as “a risk-taker.” He says: “She is innovative—with spirited titles and musical outbursts—but also nods to poetic tradition with rhyming sonnets and other lyric techniques. I take delight in so many of these lines and stanzas. I am engaged, throughout, and admire her wide-ranging talent.”

The New York Public Library revealed that Karen Russell is the winner of the 2012 Young Lions Fiction Award for her debut novel, Swamplandia! The award includes a $10,000.

This award recognizes an American writer 35-years-old or younger for publishing a novel or a short story collection. Russell (pictured, via) has published a novel and a short story collection (St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves).

Here’s more from the announcement: “The judges—Alvaro Enrigue, A.M. Homes and Adam Levin—chose Russell’s debut novel Swamplandia! from among five works of fiction. The other finalists were Teju Cole (for Open City), Benjamin Hale (for The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore), Ben Lerner (for Leaving the Atocha Station) and Jesmyn Ward (for Salvage the Bones).”

Wiesław Mysliwski’s Stone Upon Stone (translated by Bill Johnston) has won the Best Translated Book Award for fiction. The poetry prize went to Kiwao Nomura’s Spectacle & Pigsty translated by Kyoko Yoshida and Forrest Gander)

The annual award is offered by Three Percent at the University of Rochester, honoring “the best original works of international literature and poetry published in the U.S. over the previous year.” The winning translators and writers will share a $20,000 award donated by Amazon.

Here’s more about Mysliwski’s novel: “Stone Upon Stone—his first work to be translated into English—is narrated by Syzmek, a Polish farmer determined to build a tomb for himself after a life of boozing, brawling, fighting in the resistance, serving as a marriage officer, and exaggerating his way through the twentieth century and the modernization of his small town … This is the second book published by Archipelago, the Brooklyn-based nonprofit press, to win the award. (Attila Bartis’s Tranquility won in 2009.)”

Wimpy Kid series author and illustrator Jeff Kinney was crowned “Author of the Year” at the Children’s Choice Book Awards gala in New York City. This marked the second year in a row that a middle grade author has emerged victorious in this category.

Follow this link to check out videos from last night’s gala. We’ve posted the full list of winners below.

Kids cast their votes for the awards, breaking last year’s record with more than 900,000 submissions. The Children’s Book Council hosted the event to celebrate the 93rd anniversary of Children’s Book Week.

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Jane Rogers has won the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award for her novel, The Testament of Jessie Lamb.

Below, we’ve embedded free samples of all the books on the shortlist for the UK’s prestigious science fiction prize.

Here’s more from Tom Hunter, the Prize director: “”It wasn’t an obvious Arthur C Clarke winner – it’s not from a science fiction publisher but from a small Scottish press … It offers a route into dealing with quite serious issues, about science, about maternity and about making choices.”

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Poet and novelist Ben Lerner has won The Believer Book Award for his novel, Leaving the Atocha Station. Below, we’ve linked to free samples of all the books on the shortlist.

Check it out: “In Lerner’s hilarious and sensitive novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, a young poet named Adam Gordon plays a deeply identifiable (self-doubting, pretentious, plagued-by-his-moment-in-history) fool. Lerner’s three previous books of (marvellous) poetry were no doubt the training ground for his incredible sensitivity to the nuances of thought, for his beautiful and flawless sentences, and for his power to evoke scenes in the mind. The book is short, but so dense and full of life and feeling.”

Heather Christle won The Believer Poetry Award for her collection, The Trees The Trees.

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The Mystery Writers of America have revealed the winners of this year’s Edgar Awards. The annual prize is named after beloved writer Edgar Allan Poe, awarded to the best authors in the mystery genre since 1945.

Follow this link to read free samples of all the finalists, the best mystery books of the year.

These awards recognize the following categories: novel, first novel, paperback original, fact crime, critical/biographical, short story, juvenile, young adult, play, and TV episode. Last year’s winners included Steve Hamilton, Dori Hillestad Butler, and Charlie Price. Below, we’ve listed the winners in several top categories. Read more

While no Pulitzer Prize was awarded for fiction this year, it didn’t hurt book sales as many booksellers worried.

In fact, the controversial press may have helped sales for Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell and The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, all of which were nominated.

The New York Observer has more: “Thanks to the coverage surrounding the non-awarding of the 2012 Pulitzer, sales of all three finalists were spiking; one of those titles, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, had even sold out in hardcover on Amazon. (My own informal canvass of half-a-dozen Manhattan bookstores last week likewise failed to turn up a single copy of Train Dreams.) These initial returns suggested two healthy correctives to the general publishers’ alarm.”

The shortlist for the 2012 Orwell Prize shortlist has been revealed. Below, we’ve linked to free samples of all the finalists.

Here’s more about the award: “The Prize was established in its present form by the late Professor Sir Bernard Crick in 1994, ‘to encourage writing in good English – while giving equal value to style and content, politics or public policy, whether political, economic, social or cultural – of a kind aimed at or accessible to the reading public, not to specialist or academic audiences.’”

If you want more books, follow these links to our literary mixtapes with free samples of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize winners, the Orion Book Award finalists, the Best Mystery Books of 2011

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