1. The National Book Foundation announced its latest roster of 5 Under 35 honorees Wednesday morning on BuzzFeed, including Angela Flournoy, whose debut novel The Turner House (HMH) is also on the current National Book Awards fiction longlist. The other honorees are:
Colin Barrett, Young Skins (Black Cat)
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Fra Keeler (Dorothy Project)
Tracy O’Neill, The Hopeful (Ig Publishing)
Megan Kruse, Call Me Home (Hawthorne Books)
2. The Kirkus Prize announced shortlists in fiction, nonfiction, and various children’s book categories, with the winners to be announced at a ceremony in Austin, TX on October 15. In fiction, National Book Award longlisted titles by Hanya Yanagihara and Lauren Groff also appear on the Kirkus Prize list, while new MacArthur honoree Ta-Nehisi Coates adds another nomination for Between the World and Me. The complete nominees comprise:
Fiction
The Incarnations by Susan Barker (Touchstone)
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin (FSG)
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff (Riverhead)
The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli; translated by Christina MacSweeney (Coffee House Press)
The Book of Aron by Jim Shepard (Knopf)
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (Doubleday)
Nonfiction
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Spiegel & Grau)
Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War that Won It by John Ferling (Bloomsbury)
H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (Grove)
The Deluge by Adam Tooze (Viking)
Pacific by Simon Winchester (Harper)
The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf (Knopf)
Picture Book
The New Small Person by Lauren Child (Candlewick)
Lillian’s Right to Vote by Jonah Winter; illustrated by Shane W. Evans (Schwartz & Wade)
Middle Grade
Echo by Pam Muñoz Ryan (Scholastic)
Funny Bones: Posada and His Day of the Dead Calaveras by Duncan Tonatiuh (Abrams)
Young Adult
The Game of Love and Death by Martha Brockenbrough (Arthur A. Levine)
Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older (Arthur A. Levine)
3. The Dayton Literary Peace prizes have gone to Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson (for nonfiction) and The Great Glass Sea by Josh Weil (for fiction).
4. The last of the CWA Dagger Awards were given out in a ceremony Tuesday evening:
Gold Dagger: Life or Death by Michael Robotham (Sceptre/Mulholland)
Ian Fleming Steel Dagger: Cop Town by Karin Slaughter (Century/Delacorte)
New Blood Dagger: Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson (Heinemann/Ecco)
5. MysteriousPress.com will launch the Mysterious Press Award, providing a $25,000 prize and publication by MysteriousPress.com to the best unpublished ebook original mystery, and announce the first winner at the 2016 Frankfurt Book Fair. The contest is open to established authors as well as first-time novelists, with submissions accepted only from accredited literary agents and never published previously in any format. Sponsoring the contest in tandem with the publisher are its publishing partners Open Road, Head of Zeus, Hayakawa, Dutch Media, Bonnier, and Bastei Lubbe.
6. The Folio Prize will not be awarded in 2016 after the Folio Society pulled its sponsorship earlier this year. In a confirmation on its website, the Prize said: “As we continue our work to secure a new sponsor for the Folio Prize, we have decided not to run a prize in March 2016. Instead, we are concentrating our resources on another promising development for the spring, while at the same time exploring how the prize might best fulfil its aim of bringing great books to readers in the future. We passionately believe there remains a place for a prize that is, uniquely, run by writers, and we intend to return with a full-scale prize in 2017.”
Two other UK prizes are also looking for new sponsors –both the Samuel Johnson prize for nonfiction and the Dublin-based prize FKA the IMPAC — and the UK National Book Awards are skipping 2015 while hoping to land a television contract for 2016.