Sebastian Mallaby‘s biography of former chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan,The Man Who Knew, won the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. Shortlists were announced for the UK’s Costa Awards in four categories. The nominees include: Novel Days Without End, by Sebastian Barry (Viking/Faber & Faber) This Must Be the Place, by Maggie O’Farrell (Knopf/Tinder Press) The Essex Serpent, by Sarah Perry (Custom House/Serpent’s Tail) The Gustav Sonata, by Rose Tremain (Norton/Chatto & Windus) First Novel The Good Guy, by Susan Beale (John Murray) My Name is Leon, by Kit de Waal (S&S/Viking UK) The Words in My […]
Awards
People, Etc.
At Simon & Schuster Children’s, Audrey Gibbons has been promoted to senior publicist. Recipients were announced for the second round of $1.75 million in grants that James Patterson is providing to school libraries across the country, working in partnerships with Scholastic Reading Club, which matches the grants with points for classroom materials purchases. 452 schools are receiving funds from the latest grants. Patterson says in the announcement: “We’ve just come out of the most divisive presidential election in history—and among all the issues that captivated voters, education wasn’t one of them. It was hardly discussed. Nearly half of the American […]
Triumph at The National Book Awards: Whitehead, Lewis, Kendi and Borzutzky
With anticipation of life in Trump’s America weighing heavily throughout the evening, the National Book Awards ceremony on Wednesday evening was a bastion of diversity, resistance and hope, celebrating joy and the enduring power of words and reading to change and reframe the world. Colson Whitehead‘s The Underground Railroad was expected to win the fiction award, and is by far the most commercially successful of the year’s NBA contenders, but the emotion of the evening and its celebration of stories, publishers and sentiments outside of the mainstream was less expected. As chair of the nonfiction judges Masha Gessen noted in discussing […]
People: Gibson to Grove Atlantic, and More
George Gibson, whose job as publishing director at Bloomsbury US is being eliminated, will join Grove Atlantic as executive editor in January. CEO Morgan Entrekin says in the announcement that “everyone at Grove Atlantic is thrilled.” He notes, “George is admired here and around the world as a brilliant, gracious, passionate publisher and editor. His independent publishing experience at David Godine, Walker and Bloomsbury makes him a perfect fit for us. In addition, George is a longtime friend and I’m excited to welcome him as a colleague.” Gibson adds, “I have such longstanding admiration for Morgan and his colleagues, for the […]
Whitehead Wins (Amazon’s Book of the Year)
Ahead of tomorrow night’s National Book Awards, Amazon has named Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad as their book of the year. (While it’s early days, the book is already the clear leader in our aggregation of best book of the year lists, as well.) Also on their top 10, however, is another NBA fiction candidate, Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn. Young People’s Literature nominee Nicola Yoon also makes the Amazon list. There were some technical glitches when the “best books of 2016” package first went live — omitting Zadie Smith’s Swing Time from the top 20 carousel (even though it was listed in […]
People: Thien Wins Giller Prize
Madeleine Thien won the Giller Prize for her novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Norton/Knopf Canada), which was shortlisted for the Booker and also won the Governor General’s Prize for Fiction. Thien will receive $100,000 (CA) along with the prize. Christine McNamara has been appointed to the new position of vp, marketing strategy at the Penguin Publishing Group. Previously she was vp, partnerships & content marketing at Penguin Random House’s consumer marketing development group, which announced its own round of promotions: Katherine McCahill moves up to vp, director, partnerships, consumer events, and apps; Lilly Kim is promoted to director, partnerships; […]