MAIN NEWS HEADLINES October 19 – October 26, 2006 Edition Fall Roundup Of Important Literary Prizes /10/19/06—Finalists or winners of four major literary awards have all been named in the month of October. Winners of the Quill Awards were recognized in ceremonies October 10, as were winners of the Man Booker Award in London. The two major prize events were followed the very next day by the announcement of finalists for The National Book Awards at City Lights Books in San Francisco, and on October 12 the Nobel Prize for Literary was revealed. QUILL BOOK AWARD: Tyler Perry’s Don’t Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings (Riverhead) was named the Book of the Year by readers in the second Quill Book Awards. Earrings also earned the top award in the Humor category. More than 600 publishing members attended the Quill presentations October 10, held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The event is sponsored by Reed Business Information and NBC. A complete list of winners is at http://www.thequills.org/ MAN BOOKER AWARD: Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize for fiction with The Inheritance of Loss (Simon Prosser). At age 35 Desai is the youngest woman to ever win the U.K.’s most prestigious literary honor. Read the full story at the UK’s Publishing News, http://www.publishingnews.co.uk/pn/pno_news3.asp NATIONAL BOOK AWARD: The 20 Finalists for the 2006 National Book Awards, announced October 11, represent extraordinary writing in widely divergent styles and include the first graphic novel ever nominated for a National Book Award. Among the Finalists is Gene Luen Yang, a Chinese-American comic artist, whose graphic novel, American Born Chinese, is a Finalist in the category of Young People’s Literature, and Mark Z. Danielewski, a Fiction Finalist, whose novel Only Revolutions is told in parallel free verse and breaks with conventions of traditional storytelling. In the Non-Fiction category, Taylor Branch is nominated for On Canaan’s Edge, his third volume about Martin Luther King, Jr. Two nominated works in this category-Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower and Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City-focus on 9/11 and Iraq, respectively. Two Fiction finalists-Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country and Jess Walter’s The Zero, use 9/11 as a point of departure, as well. Several of this year’s Finalists have been Finalists in previous years including Richard Powers (a Finalist in 1993), Taylor Branch (a Finalist in 1989), Louise Glück (a Finalist in 1992 and 1999), and M.T. Anderson (a Finalist in 2002). Winners will be announced November 15 at an awards dinner in New York. NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE: The 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded on October 12 to Orhan Pamuk, the first Turkish author ever to win the Nobel. Pamuk’s novels, written in Turkish, include Snow and My Name is Red. Pamuk, the only Turkish author widely known in America, has spoken out against his government for its unwillingness to deal with painful events in history, including the massacre of Armenians during World War I, and recent killings of Kurdish people in Turkey’s southeastern region. Last December, he was put on trial for “insulting Turkishness” but the charges were later dropped. The Swedish Academy said in announcing the award that Mr. Pamuk’s “quest for the melancholic soul of his native city [Istanbul],” led him to discover “new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.” For more information see http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2006/ The Pulitzer Prize for Letters, will be awarded in May 2007. Entry deadline for submissions was October 15, 2006.