Literary Fiction by People of Color discussion

From the WaPo...

Recent literary awards and honors:

Andrea Elliott’s “Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City” won the $15,000 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism and the $50,000 Gotham Book Prize for outstanding works about New York City. Elliott’s book follows the life of an 11-year-old girl and her family in a Brooklyn shelter. Our reviewer called it gripping and vivid.

Brandon Taylor won the Story Prize for “Filthy Animals.” The $20,000 prize recognizes the year’s best collection of short stories. Our reviewer noted that Taylor trained as a scientist, and “he brings to his marvelous first story collection a scientist’s sense of wonder”.

Dawnie Walton’s “The Final Revival of Opal & Nev” won the $35,000 Aspen Words Literary Prize, given by the Aspen Institute to honor a work of fiction that illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on thought and culture. In her review for The Washington Post, Danielle Evans wrote, “Dawnie Walton’s debut novel is a dazzling triumph”.

Also this:

Rabih Alameddine received the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Award for his novel “The Wrong End of the Telescope.” The $15,000 prize recognizes the best work of fiction by an American permanent resident. Oprah Winfrey accepted the organization’s Literary Champion honor. Noting that her famous book club is now more than 25 years old, Winfrey said, “Belonging to a community of readers makes every reader an aspirational one, open to new voices and new characters, however different, eager to receive and understand another’s point of view and empathize with it.”

BTW Alameddine's "The Hakawati" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2... is one of my top ten lifetime reads!

William wrote: "From the WaPo...

Recent literary awards and honors:

Andrea Elliott’s “Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City” won the $15,000 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence i..."

Thanks for sharing!

Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City has just won another award - Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction!

And The Final Revival of Opal & Nev has won the 2022 Fiction Audie Award. It is a full cast audio!

William wrote: "Also this:

Rabih Alameddine received the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Award for his novel “The Wrong End of the Telescope.” The $15,000 prize recognizes the best work of fiction by an American permanent r..."

I enjoyed The Wrong End of the Telescope as I have all of Alameddine's books that I have read.

I have not read The Hakawati, but I am adding to my tbr list!

Kiese Laymon has been awarded a 2022 MacArthur Fellowship.

Kiese Laymon of Rice University is a writer "bearing witness to the myriad forms of violence that mark the Black experience in formally inventive fiction and nonfiction."

Kiese Laymon, 48, the author of “Heavy: an American Memoir,” is one of the new MacArthur fellows. His work has been acclaimed as one of the finest personal histories of the last half century and banned by school boards.

It is perhaps the most coveted award in academia, the arts and sciences. You can't get nominated and the pool of candidates is a tightly-held secret. It's also a sweet cash prize. This year's 25 MacArthur Fellows will each receive $800,000, a "no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential," according to the MacArthur Foundation website.

Congratulations to all of 2022 MacArthur Fellows.

For more information here is the link:
https://www.macfound.org/programs/fel...

Wonderful news about the award for Kiese Laymon!!