Andrew Kidd “has decided to leave agenting” and will depart Aitken Alexander at the end of October after 6 years there. The announcement says he will “pursue a new path in the book industry,” apparently to be announced in November.
Eric Price has joined Melville House in the newly created role of vp, business development. Previously he was director of sales and marketing at Quercus US and before then was associate publisher and coo at Grove Atlantic.
At Penguin Random House US, Akiko Iwamoto has been promoted to regional sales director, Asia, while Mike Zaug moves up to regional sales director, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, and India. Iwamoto will be based in Tokyo while Zaug will be based in New York.
At Kensington, Anne Marie Turner has been promoted to marketing & projects manager.
Sandra Bishop has joined the Transatlantic Literary Agency as an agent. She was a vice president at McGregor Literary, where she worked for six years before going out on her own as an independent agent, and she will continue to work out of Portland, OR. In addition, Jennifer Starkman has left the agency for personal reasons; her client list will be absorbed by other agents at Transatlantic.
Poet, translator, and essayist Alastair Reid, 88, died September 21 from complications of pneumonia.
Author and playwright J. California Cooper, 82, died September 20 in Seattle. She was the author of six short story collections and four novels, including Life is Short But Wide and Family.
Bob Shacochis‘s The Woman Who Lost Her Soul has won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction. The judges praised it as “an intricate portrait of the catastrophic events that have led to an endless cycle of vengeance and war between cultures.” In addition, Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here by Karima Bennoune won the prize for nonfiction.