Swamplandia! author Karen Russell and novelist Donald Antrim are among the new class of 24 MacArthur Foundation fellows (now providing honorees with $625,000 over five years).
Margaret Rogalski has joined Gotham & Avery as publicist. Previously she was a publicist at Princeton Architectural Press.
Australian novelist Christopher Koch, 81, author of The Year of Living Dangerously and a two-time winner of the Miles Franklin Award, died on Sunday.
Dave Holton, 66, who worked with BEA for more than 20 years, passed away on September 18 after a long battle with cancer. BEA show director Steve Rosato writes on his blog: “Dave did a lot to make BEA a special event, but that was only a small part of his life because he was active in his community and spent his free time raising tens of thousands of dollars for many charitable causes every year.”
In the UK, Phil Earle is leaving Bloomsbury (where he is children’s sales director) to join David Fickling Books in January as sales and marketing director.
Sophy Thompson will join Thames & Hudson in the new position of publishing director. to the new role of publishing director. She was at Flammarion, overseeing their illustrated books.
Lady Antonia Fraser has resigned from a recently-formed informal advisory council for the Booker International Prize in protest over the eligibility changes for the original Booker Prize. “I have resigned from the committee since I was not warned about this when I was asked to join in August,” she told the Evening Standard.
In other briefs, ScreenDaily reports that multiple studios and production companies are pursuing film rights to Glenn Greenwald’s book about Edward Snowden and the NSA, which Metropolitan Books acquired this summer for publication in early 2014. They claim that Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way and their studio partner Warner Bros. are the current leaders to acquire the rights.