Category: Awards

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Diana Souhami wins 2021 Polari prize for No Modernism Without Lesbians

No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami has won the 2021 Polari prize for LGBTQ+ books. The account of a group of gay women who helped to begin the modernist movement was called “richly researched, entertaining and hugely enjoyable” by judge and CEO of the National Centre for Writing, Chris Gribble. It offers “insight into the lives, passions and legacies of a group of outstanding women who together helped change the course of their culture”, he added. “Souhami is a brilliant guide and this book a celebration, corrective and fillip all in one.” Read more

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Here are the 2021 Kirkus Prize winners

This evening, at a virtual ceremony hosted from the Austin Central Library, Kirkus Reviews announced the winners of its eighth annual Kirkus Prizes in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ literature. Each of the three winners, chosen from the 1,531 books that received Kirkus stars this year, and narrowed down from the list of finalists announced in September, will receive a cash prize of $50,000. Read more

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Hanif Abdurraqib wins the Gordon Burn prize for A Little Devil in America

Abdurraqib’s book is a meditation on Black performance in the modern age, moving from Beyoncé’s Super Bowl half-time show to Aretha Franklin’s funeral. It is inspired by Josephine Baker’s words: “I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too.” It topped a six-strong shortlist featuring titles including Jenni Fagan’s Luckenbooth and Salena Godden’s Mrs Death Misses Death, to win the prize, which celebrates “literature that is fearless in both ambition and execution”, in honour of the late writer Gordon Burn. Read more

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Laura Jean McKay wins the Arthur C Clarke award

Twenty years before Margaret Atwood won the inaugural Arthur C Clarke award for her seminal novel The Handmaid’s Tale, she published a poem entitled The animals in that country. Now Laura Jean McKay, who borrowed the title of Atwood’s poem for her debut novel, has gone on to win the prestigious prize, with judges praising her story of a pandemic that enables humans to understand the language of animals for “reposition[ing] the boundaries of science fiction once again”. Read more

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Playwright Matthew López makes history as first Latino to win Tony for best play

“The Inheritance” was a play about the legacy of the AIDS epidemic (in two parts, it ran a total of six hours). It premiered in London in 2018, where The Telegraph called it “perhaps the most important American play of the century so far.” Read more

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Pittsburgh poet Toi Derricotte wins Academy of American Poetry prize for her ‘proven mastery’

Toi Derricotte, the revered, award-winning poet and professor emerita of English at the University of Pittsburgh. has known for about a month that she was the recipient of a major prize from the Academy of American Poetry, but she had to keep it a secret. This week, Ms. Derricotte was able to share her secret when it was officially announced that she is the recipient of its 2021 Wallace Stevens Award. Read more

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