Latest news with #literaryprize
The Guardian
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
New prize for translated poetry aims to tap into boom for international-language writing
A new poetry prize for collections translated into English is opening for entries next month. Publishers Fitzcarraldo Editions, Giramondo Publishing and New Directions have launched the biennial Poetry in Translation prize, which will award an advance of $5,000 (£3,700) to be shared equally between poet and translator. The winning collection will be published in the UK and Ireland by Fitzcarraldo Editions, in Australia and New Zealand by Giramondo and in North America by New Directions. 'We wanted to open our doors to new poetry in translation to give space and gain exposure to poetries we may not be aware of,' said Fitzcarraldo poetry editor Rachael Allen. 'There is no other prize like this that we know.' The prize announcement comes amid a sales boom in translated fiction in the UK. Joely Day, Allen's co-editor at Fitzcarraldo, believes that 'the space the work of translators has opened up in the reading lives of English speakers through the success of fiction in translation will also extend to poetry'. Translated work is a focus of the three publishers behind the prize. Fitzcarraldo has published translated works by Nobel prize winners Olga Tokarczuk, Jon Fosse and Annie Ernaux. 'Our prose lists have always maintained a roughly equitable balance between English-language and translation, and some of our greatest successes have been books in translation,' said Day. 'We'd like to bring the same diversity of voices to our poetry publishing, and this prize will be a step in that direction.' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion The prize is open to living poets from around the world, writing in any language other than English. The prize is being launched to find works 'which are formally innovative, which feel new, which have a strong and distinctive voice, which surprise and energise and move us,' said Day. 'My personal hope is that the prize reaches fledgling or aspiring translators and provides an opening for them, that it enables translators of poetry in particular to find a platform and encourages translators who want to work with poetry to do so.' Submissions will be open from 15 July to 15 August. A shortlist will be announced later this year, with the winner announced in January 2026 and publication of the winning collection scheduled for 2027. The 'unique' award 'brings poetry from around the world into English, and foregrounds the essential role of translation in our literature,' said Nick Tapper, associate publisher at Giramondo. 'Its global outlook will bring new readers to poets whose work deserves wide and sustained attention.'
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Inaugural IGF Archer Amish Award to Spotlight Contemporary Indian Stories on Global Stage
$25,000 literary prize to amplify Indian voices globally LONDON, June 16, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- India Global Forum is set to announce the winner of the inaugural IGF Archer Amish Award for Storytellers next week. Launched at IGF London 2024, in partnership with internationally acclaimed authors Jeffrey Archer and Amish Tripathi, and sponsored by the House of Abhinandan Lodha, this distinguished literary prize, honours contemporary Indian fiction that reflects the diversity, aspirations, and vibrant energy of modern India, strengthening cultural bridges and fostering richer global dialogue. With a generous prize of $25,000, one of the biggest for fiction globally and alongside the ranks of some of the world's top literary prizes, the IGF Archer Amish Award positions Indian literature prominently on the world map, celebrating exceptional Indian authors whose works vividly capture the complexity and dynamism of modern India. Rt Hon Lisa Nandy MP, Secretary of State for Culture, Media, and Sport, UK Government, will present the award along IGF Chairman Manoj Ladwa and authors Archer and Amish. Her presence highlights the UK's evolving cultural policy and funding vision, particularly the increased significance of India as a pivotal creative partner post-FTA. The distinguished finalists vying for this prestigious accolade include Nitya Neelakanthan, author of Navapashanam – The Quest for the Nine Magical Poisons; Yogesh Pandey, author of The Kill Switch; and Dr. Shalini Mullick, author of The Way Home. Commenting on the vision behind this pioneering initiative, Manoj Ladwa, Founder and Chairman of India Global Forum, says "The IGF Archer Amish Award embodies our commitment to amplifying Indian voices globally, championing narratives that spark cultural conversations and deepen mutual understanding at a critical juncture in UK-India relations." "Awards are very important because they give recognition, and they allow someone who had slaved night and day to achieve something to realise they're not on their own, stuck in a box," says Lord Archer, the prolific British author of bestsellers such as 'Kane and Abel' and 'The Clifton Chronicles.' Renowned author Amish Tripathi, who co-conceived the award and leads the judging panel, adds " This is an award that aims to encourage the gift of storytelling itself, and that is one of the key drivers. It is also around Indians talking about themselves, their own stories. The way Westerners see India, in a lot of ways through the Western lens, it is one narrative, one lens, which is very different from how Indians see India." The award ceremony is scheduled to take place at the prestigious Queen Elizabeth II Centre in London on 18 June, as part of IGF London 2025, marking a significant moment in the ongoing cultural dialogue between the UK and India. About India Global ForumIndia Global Forum tells the story of contemporary India. The pace of change and growth India has set itself is an opportunity for the world. IGF is the gateway for businesses and nations to help seize that opportunity. To know more, click here Social Media Handles & Hashtag to Follow Twitter: @IGFUpdates & @manojladwaLinkedIn: India Global Forum#IGFLondon Photo - - View original content to download multimedia:
Irish Times
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Inside judging one of the big literary prizes: searching for sinister outside forces, table banging and some gems of books
Last summer I was asked to be a judge for the Nero Fiction Award . Would I like to read 70-odd novels by Irish and UK writers and confer with two other judges to decide what was, according to us, 2024's Nero-Fiction-Award-worthy book? I considered it an honour. Also, my curiosity was piqued. Judging a fiction prize would give me a chance to see what actually goes down at those legendary tables of disputation where literary careers are made or broken. Would one of the other judges steamroll the rest of us into giving the prize to an unpopular and frankly rubbish book? Would the steamroller-in-chief be me? Would sinister outside forces lean on us to ensure that we made the 'right' choice? Would I be able to read 70 novels in four months? As it turned out, there was no steamrolling, and no outside influences of any kind. My fellow judges – Dr Will Smith, a former academic who now runs the Sam Reed bookshop in the Lake District, and Zoe West, literary editor of Women's Weekly and Woman and Home – were civility itself. We argued for our favourites. Nobody shouted or banged the table. Our eventual choices were accepted without question. Writers love to complain that literary awards committees are black boxes of partisan conspiracy. I am, in a way, sorry to disappoint. It also turned out that I didn't actually have to read 70 novels in four months. When the books themselves arrived at my house in giant boxes, I had regrets. All that print! All those slaughtered trees! My precious spare time! But a friend who had judged a major literary award a few years ago let me in on a trade secret: 'You read until the book disqualifies itself.' This became my guiding principle – and incidentally, I recommend it to all readers at all times. READ MORE What interested me about reading for the Nero was the chance to survey a large cross-section of contemporary novels, all published in the same year and in the same geographical region. Not a complete panoptic overview of the novel in 2024, but as close as anyone is likely to get. The Nero Award is a good idea. It seeks out books that are primarily 'a good read'. Specifically, the judges were asked to 'choose the books they would most want to press into the hands of friends and family for their quality and readability'. In other words the Nero Fiction Award is a prize for middlebrow novels. The word 'middlebrow' has been abused by highbrows but I want to reclaim it. The great central tradition of the novel in English is middlebrow. (The key novel of the 19th century is called Middlemarch.) So, what is the condition of the middlebrow novel in the UK and Ireland, as of 2024? Usually people answer this sort of question by praising the novel's 'rude health'. But this wasn't quite what I concluded. We read some excellent books. We had no trouble finding a shortlist of four good ones. But speaking for myself, I found the middlebrow novel in an uncertain state. Some general findings. People are writing a lot of giant, emphatic novels. The prose and the plots are uneconomical. Economy, of course, is the fruit of revision, and novelists simply aren't revising their prose enough, or well enough. They roll out their paragraphs like flannel. Hence many of the novels I read had a sort of polystyrene quality. They were large but light, made up mostly of air. As if they were in some way not fully rooted in the real, the tangible world. What else? Tyrants recur, in our contemporary novels. Property developers, billionaires, feudal lords, secret policemen, kings, gods ... This shouldn't surprise us. We have entered a new age of tyranny. The old autocrats haunt our middlebrow fiction, as if to prepare liberal readers for the future. Another discovery: if the contemporary novel has a characteristic tone, it is one of ingratiation. Novelists are constantly soliciting our approval. As if the proper response to a novel is to click the Like button. The context in which such novels appear to be written is not the old reality of realism but the new reality of social media. Climate change looms over our middlebrow novels, also unsurprisingly. It tends to appear in the form of scenes in which chaotic or catastrophic weather events occur. But the way to write about climate change is not to put lots of meteorology in your book. It's to write about climate change by seeming to write about something else. This, after all, is how we actually think about climate change, most of the time: by thinking, or by seeming to be thinking, about something else. I read the novels 'blind' (that is, I didn't Google any of them beforehand). With alarming frequency, I would toil my way through 400 pages of semi-literate garbage, only to discover, when I finally did Google the book in question, that it had sold a million copies, was everyone's Book of the Year, and was already being turned into a Netflix series. As Tony Soprano would say: whaddaya gonna do? As if in compensation for this sort of thing, I read three or four superb novels that I would not otherwise have encountered in the course of my reading life. Among them was our winner, Adam S Leslie's unnerving, dreamlike folk horror novel Lost in the Garden: a choice of which I am proud. But after tackling those 70-odd novels, my inescapable conclusion was that the middlebrow novel as such is in the middle of a crisis of faith. The liberal world that nourished middlebrow fiction is being rolled back across the West. The cultural contexts that shaped the middlebrow novel, and which formed its vital subject matter, are evaporating before our eyes. Our final judge's meeting took place in London, last November. It was the day before the American presidential election. The next day, I watched Trump sweep the popular vote. I had just read 70 novels about the old world. I wondered: what kind of novel might help us start to think about the new? Kevin Power is Associate Professor of Literary Practice in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin
