The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.
The Mozambican poet, fiction writer and biologist Mia Couto has won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, a biennial award sometimes called "The American Nobel." Couto, who has written dozens of books in his native Portuguese, including novels, short stories, poetry collections and a children's book, tells PolicyMic: "It is a sad moment for Mozambique because we are starting a war that we thought would never come back again. So to receive this good news is something like a compensation for me." Sponsored by University of Oklahoma along with the Neustadt family and the journal World Literature Today, the $50,000 prize has been given to writers such as Czeslaw Milosz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The executive director of World Literature Today, Robert Con Davis-Undiano, says in a statement, "Mia Couto is trying to lift the yoke of colonialism from a culture by reinvigorating its language. A master of Portuguese prose, he wants to lift that burden one word, one sentence, and one narrative at a time, and in this endeavor he has few if any peers."
Catherine Chung speaks to NPR's Kat Chow about writing and embracing the label "Asian-American writer": "I love English. ... I wrote my first poem when I was seven in second grade. It was a haiku; it was my first moment where I felt like I had control over language in a way that I could express myself or understand myself. I was seven and I still remember the thrill of it, and I feel like because of that moment, I became a writer."
For The New York Times, Fares Akram and Jodi Rudoren report on new, Hamas-influenced textbooks used by Palestinian students: "Textbooks have long been a point of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which dueling historical narratives and cultural clashes underpin a territorial fight."
Diana Chien has three poems in The American Reader. In "Paintings at Lascaux," she writes:
"The man is already wearing his death
in his face as he falls.
His fingers splay like crows' feet,
and all his thoughts have fallen
to dust, a little seed, a little clear water."