Tim Winton wins Miles Franklin Literary Award

An award recognizing the best Australian book or play has been given, for a record-breaking fourth time, to novelist Tim Winton for his short novel Breath, which is set amidst a surfing community in Western Australia.

Catherine Schine of the New York Review of Books has called Tim Winton "a practitioner of what might be called the school of Macho Romanticism, or perhaps better, Heroic Sensitivity," and he has been compared to Hemingway, Mann, and McEwan. His previous novels Shallows (1984), Cloudstreet (1992), and Dirt Music (2002) have also won Miles Franklin Awards, and Cloudstreet--about two working class families living together from 1943-1963--is considered by many Australians a favorite book.

Winton's The Riders (1995) and Dirt Music were also shortlisted for Man Booker Prizes.

Literary journals are the bellwether of literature

John Freedman, editor of Granta, comments on the literary journal's vibrant and innovative role in the community and blasts a directive made by the Canadian heritage minister last February stating that journals must sell a lofty five thousand copies in order to receive government assistance.

Calling the literary journal a daring and diverse object in the world of literature, Freedman accuses the publishing industry of underestimating the tastes of readers and overvaluing profits.

From The Independent:

Literary journals are the antidote to this wrong-headed attempt to try and engineer sales. Their primary function, after all, is to undermine this economy of prestige, to promote gross miscegenation, messiness, conflict and disorder; to subvert the market; and to place writers in unexpected places, where they can create their own unlikely community of readers.

Nadine Gordimer had her first publication in the Johannesburg magazine, Forum, but her career as an international writer began with an acceptance from the good ol' boys at the Virginia Quarterly Review. The illustrious – and sadly defunct – Story magazine was founded in Austria in 1931, before moving back to New York, where it introduced everyone from JD Salinger to Charles Bukowski. Arundhati Roy would not have been an unfamiliar name to anyone looking closely at television credits in India; but her fictional voice was launched first in Granta magazine, which circulates primarily in Britain and America, and where her name was indeed new.

It is presumptuous of any literary journal to claim that it has discovered any writers – novelists and poets are hardly nickel deposits, after all – yet a good journal can make it far easier to readers to discover a new writer's work. It can take a piece of writing regardless of where it comes from and what unusual shape its story takes, and ask readers to smash into it. For these reasons the ideal reader of a literary journal is one who yearns for the lash of the new, the way a boxer needs to be hit.

Pepetela warns of Angolan class divide

Comparing social unrest and extreme poverty to a volcano about to erupt, writer and former education minister Artur Pestana, known by the pseudonym Pepetela, described the injustice of widespread poverty in one of the world's most resource-rich nations during a book presentation on June 18.

Angola, one of the foremost producers of oil in Africa, ended a long civil war in 2002 and has been working on economic improvement ever since. Though oil executives stay in luxurious hotel rooms costing four hundred dollars a night, much of the country's 16.5 million population lives without running water or electricity.

Pepetela's work, highly regarded throughout the region, has long explored this contradiction.

In one of his famous short stories, entitled "This Country is Great" Pepetela tells the story of a young boy who comes home running to tell his mother that oil was squirting out from his neighbour's back yard. The boy later discovers that the oil came from a leak in a nearby refinery and is disillusioned when he realises that many of the riches his country possess are out of reach to the majority of the population.

Pepetela's comments echo those of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who has ruled the southwestern African nation for 30 years and is expected to run in the country's first post-war presidential poll later in the year. Dos Santos has pledged to build one million homes for the poor in four years at a cost of $50 billion.

South Florida public schools expand curricula to encompass world literature

In an effort to include more diverse voices, many Florida public high school teachers now assign more works by contemporary writers from around the world, including bestsellers such as The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini from Afghanistan and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Dominican-born Junot Diaz.

While the classics of English and American literature--Shakespeare, Milton, Hawthorne, and so on--still receive their due, more teachers are giving attention to other, often overlooked voices on this vast planet.

Patricia Mazzei of the Miami Herald writes:

[A] 1993 national study, the most recent survey of its kind, found that the most frequently taught works in high schools in 1988 were remarkably similar to those taught in 1963.

Newer novels that make it into the classroom tend to be coming-of-age stories and works from other cultures, Applebee said. There has also been a notable influx of books by women and minority writers, particularly in literary anthologies.

Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou are widely read, as are Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, and novels by Amy Tan, who told the story of a Chinese family's immigrant experience in The Joy Luck Club and also wrote The Bonesetter's Daughter.

Kadare wins Albanian award

Ismail Kadare, winner of the Man Booker International Prize and nominee for a Nobel Prize in Literature, won a best book prize on June 11 at Albania's KULT culture awards for his novel The Wrong Supper.

The author, whose previous works include The Palace of Dreams and The Three-Arched Bridge, divides his time between Albania and France.

Sci-Fi Settings on Earth

The Shared Worlds summer writing program at Wofford College in South Carolina asked five best-selling and award-winning science fiction and fantasy novelists to select the five most fantastical, futuristic, and strange locations on today's earth. Elizabeth Hand, Nalo Hopkinson, Ursula K. LeGuin, China Miéville, and Michael Moorcock respectively chose Reykavik, Iceland; Kingston, Jamaica; Venice, Italy; London, England; and Marrakesh, Morocco.

To quote LeGuin:

It isn't hard to imagine a city that's built on a marsh in a lagoon, and is slowly but inevitably sinking back into the marsh, but it's the details that count; and some of the details require an active fantasy. For instance, that all the main streets are water. Sidestreets are narrow and the bridges arched, so no horses, no motorized vehicles. For centuries and centuries all traffic is on foot and by boat; and the boats are special, long, narrow, driven not by oars but by poling, for the canal-streets aren't very deep. Then they allow motorized boats on the canals, and all of sudden there's pollution, noise instead of quiet, and also wakes, waves, swamping the streets and plazas, which are already going under water in storms. Long ago the city was a powerful community, wealthy, full of artists, and built beautiful palaces and churches along the canals and on the islands –high buildings that look as delicate and colorful as the creations of glass the city is famous for. Now these buildings are as battered and threatened by floods of tourists as they are by floods of water, and the city is forced to live as a sort of museum of itself, populated more and more not by its own citizens but by foreigners. What is it like, now, to be a Venetian in Venice?

Article 301 discussed in new Turkish book

A new non-fiction book explores the role of the Turkish media and government in the 2007 murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink.

Dink, who was editor-in-chief of Agos, was shot outside his office in Istanbul on Jan. 19, 2007. At the time he was on trial for violating Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which condemns insults directed toward Turkish identity. Dink had written and published a well-researched article suggesting that Sabiha Gokcen, the adopted daughter of first president Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and Turkey's first female pilot, was of Armenian origin, and this suggested link between the nation's founder and its opposed enemy was considered blasphemous.

The Hrant Dink Murder – The Media, Judiciary, State by judiciary reporter Kemal Goktas examines the murderous consequences of Article 301, which has also been used against novelists Elif Safak and Orhan Pamuk.

Irish novelist pens biography of Byron

Edna O'Brien has written a new biography exploring the personal life of nineteenth-century English poet Lord Byron, entitled Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life.

Heller McAlpin of the Christian Science Monitor writes:

O’Brien, a passionate, iconoclastic writer herself – her early, sexually frank “Country Girls” novels were banned and burned in her native Ireland when they first appeared in the 1960s – is well suited to her subject. She has pored over reams of Byron’s letters and journals and digested Leslie A. Marchand’s 1957 three-volume “Life of Byron” to present a vivid portrait of the man whom Lady Caroline Lamb, one of his scores of jilted lovers, called “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

As captured by O’Brien, Byron was at once brilliant, magnetic, and monstrous – an arrogant son; an insatiable seducer of both sexes; an incestuous adulterer; a spendthrift; a wildly original, popular, and vilified poet; a cruel and neglectful father; a passionate traveler; and a generous friend. He idolized Napoleon and loved Greece.

O’Brien notes, “The word Byronic, to this day, connotes excess, diabological deeds and a rebelliousness answering neither to king nor commoner. Byron, more than any other poet, has come to personify the poet as rebel, imaginative and lawless.”

But who's really read it?

The Irish Times explores the curious contradiction between the many Dubliners who love celebrating Bloomsday without ever having read Joyce's book.

“I met an Australian man earlier and he said he’s read it from cover to cover,” said Breda again, rolling her eyes. “For God’s sake, we have it in our bones!”

Wales Book of the Year awards given

The 2009 Wales Book of the Year awards have been given to Deborah Kay Davies for Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful in the English language category and William Owen Roberts for Petrograd in the Welsh language category.

Grace, Tamar, and Laszlo the Beautiful is Davies's debut novel, a collection of unified short stories about two wild sisters coming of age in the 1970's. Davies is also a published poet.

Petrograd is a novel about Russians in exile after the 1917 revolution. Roberts previously won the award in 1988 for Y Pla (translated to English as Pestilence, his only work to appear in English) and was short-listed again in 2002.