The New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers has picked 15 writers and journalists as its annual fellows.

Selected from a pool of 313 applicants, this is the 15th class of fellows for the center. These writers will get a stipend, a private office in the Cullman Center and support from the library staff.

With a diverse array of people originally from Nigeria, Turkey, England, Argentina, and Serbia, the class of 2013 includes: The fiction writers Tea Obreht, Rajesh Parameswaran, Paul La Farge, and Uwem Akpan. The historians Linda Colley and Anthony Grafton. The journalists Arthur Lubow, Elizabeth Rubin, Elif Batuman, and David Grann.

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A panel of judges will compare these books against each other, eliminating one book each round until there is a winning book. Last year, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall topped the list.

Here’s more about the contest: “There will be surprises and controversies, upsets and kerfuffles. As usual, we’ll have our color commentators on hand to discuss the decisions, and our Rooster statistician will return to provide analysis and predictions. Then there’s you, the reader. Sometimes you’ll agree with the decisions, sometimes you won’t, and in both cases we hope you’ll voice your opinion in the discussion—which has become, as Salon critic Laura Miller put it last year, ‘a rare pocket of civility and informed intelligence.’”

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At the Whiting Writers’ Awards last month, we interviewed a few of the winners of the $50,000 prize.  Author Elif Batuman shared some important advice to remember about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)–it’s the perfect time to get bad writing out of your system.

Here’s an excerpt from the video interview: “My advice is keep writing. No time you spend writing will be wasted—even if you write something that’s bad. Everyone has a certain amount of bad writing to get out of their system. It’s important not to censor yourself and not to get upset or demoralized when you write bad stuff.”

Batuman won a nonfiction Whiting for her book, Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. Press play on the video above to watch. This is our fifteenth NaNoWriMo Tip of the Day. As writers around the country join the writing marathon this month, we will share one piece of advice or writing tool to help you cope with this daunting project.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.