The PEN/Faulkner Award is one of the highest honors given to American citizens for fiction writing. The award was initially established by William Faulkner who used his 1949 Nobel Prize winnings to create the the William Faulkner Foundation. The primary goal of the foundation was to support emerging fiction writers. Although the foundation was later dissolved, the award came under the management of PEN, the international writers' association.
Born on September 12, 1943, Phillip Michael Ondaatje is best known for his novel, The English Patient. Winner of the 1992 Man Booker Prize and multiple Academy Awards, the book established Ondaatje as one of Canada’s most important contemporary writers and one of the country’s biggest cultural exports.
Possession is A. S. Byatt’s most widely read novel; it won the Man Booker Prize in 2009 and made Byatt famous. This doesn’t surprise the British author who claims, “I knew people would like it. It's the only one I've written to be liked, and I did it partly to show off. I thought, Why not pull out the stops, why do this painstaking observation . . . why not write about the 19th century! I actually paced it for the first time with the reader's attention span in mind. There is very little life in 'Possession': it's all art."
When it comes to literature, there are only a few honors that rank higher than the Booker Prize: an award that seeks to name the best of the best in original novels. The prize guarantees international recognition and prestige for the winning author, but it also has a history of controversy. Does the hint of a scandal ignite your curiosity? Read on to discover the shady stories behind some of these shining stars.
Writer Ian McEwan was born June 21, 1948. He won the Man Booker Prize in 1998 for his novel Amsterdam and was nominated for the award six times to date. He earned a host of other prizes including the WH Smith Literary Award, National Book Critics’ Circle Fiction Award, and the Jerusalem Prize. In 2008, The Times named McEwan one of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.” He is best known for his novels, The Cement Garden (1978), Black Dogs (1992), Amsterdam (1998), and Atonement (2001).
Discovering that some of your favorite children’s stories are written by the same author is quite an incredible find. Contemporary classics such as: Jumanji, The Polar Express, and Zathura, to name a few, were all illustrated and written by Chris Van Allsburg.
Nobel Prize-winner, Ferit Orhan Pamuk, was born to a wealthy Turkish family on June 7, 1952. His novels have been translated into 55 languages and his work has sold over eleven million copies worldwide. As a child and young adult, Pamuk devoted himself to painting. Yet at age 23, he put his paints aside and began writing his first novel, Cevdet Bey and Sons.
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is one of the most highly sought literary awards in the United States. Since its inception in 1917, 86 writers have won the prize—among them, some of the nation’s greatest talents. Yet not all has gone smoothly. Here are five instances where the awarding (or withholding) of the Pulitzer has erupted in controversy.
Nelle Harper Lee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of To Kill a Mockingbird, was born on April 28, 1926 in the sleepy town of Monroeville Alabama. As a girl, she became friends with another future writer: Truman Capote. The two were outsiders among their peers but discovered an affinity for each other. According to Capote biographer, Gerald Clarke, “Nelle was too rough for most other girls, and Truman was too soft for most other boys.”
Born in New York City on November 20th, 1936, Don DeLillo has become an acclaimed author whose postmodernist works portray an America which has become consumed by materialism and dumbed down by a culture of meaningless interactions. He grew up in a working-class Italian American family in the Bronx. His was a childhood filled with family and wholesome entertainments. He described it as one in which he was “always out in the street. As a little boy I whiled away most of my time pretending to be a baseball announcer on the radio. I could think up games for hours at a time. There were eleven of us in a small house, but the close quarters were never a problem. I didn’t know any other way.”
