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Per Wikipedia:

Canada Book Day is a yearly event celebrated in Canada on April 23 to promote reading and books during Canada Book Week.

Canada Book Day is celebrated on the same day as World Book and Copyright Day, a yearly event organized by UNESCO to promote reading, publishing and the protection of intellectual property through copyright.

Canada Book Day was organized by the Writers’ Trust of Canada, a national organization whose mandate is to represent writers and support Canadian English-language literature. The Trust no longer organizes this event.

Penguin Random House Canada has a job opening. It’s for the position of fiction editor (Penguin). Your tasks and responsibilities will include, but not be limited to, the following:

You must read books.

You must enjoy discussing books.

You must be talented at all things bookish.

You must be a bookie at heart.

You must love penguins, especially the emperor variety.

Click here to learn more about the real job and how to apply. Deadline is April 29, 2016. For my own part, I hereby dedicate this short story to the person who fills this position.

POP Montreal has an associated writing contest called Lit POP and they want your submissions! They accept poetry (up to 5 poems) and fiction (max. 4000 words). The deadline is July 1 and the fee is $25 per entry, but if you submit by May 15 that fee goes down to $15. Winners don’t get mucho dinero, but they do get a trip to Montreal, publication in Matrix magazine, and a bunch of other cool stuff. Good luck to all those who enter!

For all you aspiring/established writers of fiction and poetry, there’s a writing contest coming up at The Antigonish Review. Fiction submissions need to be postmarked by June 1, 2016 (max. 20 pages) and poetry (max. 4 pages/150 lines) needs to be in the mail by June 30, 2016. Three cash prizes and publication in The Antigonish Review. For more information, check out this link.

Note: This contest is open to residents in ALL countries and of ALL nationalities.

Per an article in The Irish Times, “The Vegetarian towers over Man Booker International Prize long list.”

Who the what the…where the France?

Why is this a 핫이슈 (“hot issue”), you ask? Because the author of The Vegetarian, Han Kang, is a South Korean writer. Why, again, is this a wide-load deal? Because unlike their Japanese and Chinese counterparts, Korean writers still remain completely unknown to the outside world. Even for the most voracious bibliophile, South Korean authors might as well be North Korean. This is the unfortunate reality for three main reasons:

1) There is a dearth of Korean fiction that appeals to English readers.

2) The bar for Korean-to-English translations has been set so low that it’s usually painful (think of all four molars being yanked out of your mouth at the same time) to read the slim pickings that are already out there.

3) There is no vocal/famous writer or publisher championing the nation’s literature.

This year marks  the inaugural award that will combine two gargantuan literary prizes, the Man Booker International Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. So kudos to the Han River (Ms. Kang’s name is also the name of the body of water that bisects Seoul) for this remarkable achievement. Just making it to the long list of the International Booker will certainly have scores of readers curious enough to see what all the hype is about, me thinks.

If you’d like a sneak peek, you can read an excerpt from The Vegetarian here. Interestingly enough, this tidbit has a remarkably similar feel to it as Murakami Haruki’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

However, the really, really interesting back story to this story about a story is how it got to English in the first place. A British translator by the name of Deborah Smith took it upon herself to translate the first 20 pages of The Vegetarian and submitted it to a renowned publisher in the U.K., Portobello Books. Editors there were so impressed by the sample that they inked a contract before the translation was even completed!

Good luck to Ms. Kang. I know that I, for one, will be waiting with bated breath for the decision from the jury this coming May.