Tag Archives: #literature

by harrisrh | November 23, 2024 · 2:20 pm

2024 Literary Awards for Fiction

Literary Awards Season = Lots of Gift Choices

So it’s time to start shopping for holiday novels, assuming your friends, relatives, and colleagues have the time and interest in reading fiction. If you should find yourself to be so fortunate as to have a flamboyance not of flamingos but of bibliophiles in your life, you might consider some of this year’s top literary award winners and finalists. To simplify the process, I’ve put a few of them together here for your viewing pleasure. Happy shopping — and reading!

2024 Booker Prize (Winner: Orbital by Samantha Harvey)

Shortlist: James (Percival Everett), Creation Lake (Rachel Kushner), Held (Anne Michaels), The Safekeep (Yael van der Wouden), Stone Yard Devotional (Charlotte Wood)

2024 Nobel Prize for Literature (Winner: Han Kang)

Translated Works (English): The Vegetarian (2007), Greek Lessons (2011), Human Acts (2014), The White Book (2016), We Do Not Part (2021)

2024 Giller Prize (Winner: Held by Anne Michaels)

Shortlist: What I Know About You (Éric Chacour), Curiosities (Anne Fleming), Prairie Edge (Conor Kerr), Peacocks of Instagram (Deepa Rajagopalan)

2024 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (Winner: Batshit Seven by Sheung-King)

Shortlist: What I Know About You (Éric Chacour), Prairie Edge (Conor Kerr), Code Noir (Canisia Lubrin), Hi, It’s Me (Fawn Parker)

2024 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction (Winner: Empty Spaces by Jordan Abel)

Shortlist: Code Noir (Canisia Lubrin), The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: Vol. 1: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island (Kent Monkman, Gisèle Gordon), Her Body Among Animals (Paola Ferrante), Naniki (Oonya Kempadoo)

2024 National Book Award for Fiction (Winner: James by Percival Everett)

Finalists: Ghostroots (‘Pemi Aguda), Martyr! (Kaveh Akbar), All Fours (Miranda July), My Friends (Hisham Matar)

2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (Winner: Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips)

Finalists: Same Bed Different Dreams (Ed Park), Wednesday’s Child (Yiyun Li)

International Booker Prize 2024 (Winner: Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck)

Shortlist: Not a River (Selva Almada), The Details (Ia Genberg), What I’d Rather Not Think About (Jente Posthuma), Mater 2-10 (Hwang Sok-yong), Crooked Plow (Itamar Vieira Junior)

From $411 to 100K in a Heartbeat

The title of this article from the Toronto Star says it all: “Michael Redhill had $411 left in bank account before Giller Prize cheque.”

So, just to clear up this myth once and for all, writers are, for the most part, not wealthy individuals. My congratulations to Mr. Redhill, and I will report back once I’ve read his Giller Prize-winning novel, Bellevue Square.

Two of my favourite quotes from the above piece:

“Visa is very happy, I’m sure, that I won this prize.”

“I didn’t ever get a job at Starbucks, but I thought about it.”

In the meantime, consider the following article, “Everyone’s a winner,” from The Globe and Mail, which starts:

“Few countries honour their authors as exhaustively as Canada. But, with another nerve-racking awards season upon us, Mark Medley wonders: Does the infatuation help or hurt hopeful writers?”

Translation & Book Cover Designs

Ennnnn! (Sorry, I’m trying to figure out the onomatopoeia for a buzzer sound when you’re wrong.) The above book cover design would have infuriated Franz Kafka.

Josh Jones has written an interesting piece titled “Franz Kafka Says the Insect in The Metamorphosis Should Never Be Drawn; Vladimir Nabokov Draws It Anyway” for openculture.com that is quite eye-opening. Well, eye-opening in the way that word-nerd enthusiasts and translators get excited about. As Mr. Jones claims:

“If you’ve read Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis in English, it’s likely that your translation referred to the transformed Gregor Samsa as a ‘cockroach,’ ‘beetle,’ or, more generally, a ‘gigantic insect’…But the German words used in the first sentence of the story to describe Gregor’s new incarnation are much more mysterious, and perhaps strangely laden with metaphysical significance.”

As such, the following book cover design is a more open interpretation of Kafka’s intentions with Gregor’s metamorphosis.

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But there’s more to it than that. Mr. Jones goes on to quote translator Susan Bernofsky and her article from The New Yorker, “On Translating Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’“:

“[B]oth the adjective ungeheuer (meaning “monstrous” or “huge”) and the noun Ungeziefer are negations—virtual nonentities—prefixed by un.” Ungeziefer, a term from Middle High German, describes something like ‘an unclean animal unfit for sacrifice,’ belonging to ‘the class of nasty creepy-crawly things.'”

Thus, Bernofsky argues:

“Kafka wanted us to see Gregor’s new body and condition with the same hazy focus with which Gregor himself discovers them.”

And that’s why the original German publication of Die Verwandlung is closest to Kafka’s vision of the perfect book cover design.

Image result for der verwandlung

Tag Archives: #literature

2024 Literary Awards for Fiction

From $411 to 100K in a Heartbeat

Translation & Book Cover Designs

Contents

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