Good news always seems to come in threes—or fours, or fives… News of this week’s literary accolades struck with some seriously heavy hitters. The Dublin IMPAC Award has announced its finalists, which include five books in translation and a novel by Asymptote interviewee Tan Twan Eng. For this prize, especially, the stakes are quite high: the winning author receives a 100,000-Euro prize, or in the case of a translation, a 75,000-25,000-Euro writer-translator split! Karl Ove Knausgaard, contentious memoirist and nominated for the IMPAC, has been graced with double honors this week: he’s also been shortlisted for the International Foreign Fiction Prize, which historically includes two female Japanese writers as well (a first!): Yoko Ogawa and Hiromi Kawakami. It’s a good week for female writers in general: the prize formerly known as the Orange Prize the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction has announced its shortlist.
These prizes already include big lit names—but some prizes fight for the underdogs. In Finland, the Tulenkantajat Prize recognizes literature with export potential. Norwegian poet Øyvind Rimbereid has snagged his country’s prestigious Gyldendalprisen, awarded to “especially significant writing.” Also especially significant this week: the Griffin Poetry Prize has declared its nominees this week, and the international shortlist notably includes a translator-poet collaboration as well as a nomination for another Asymptote interviewee, Canadian poet Anne Carson.
Last year’s Griffin-Prizewinner (and two-time Asymptote contributor!) Fady Joudah has won a Guggenheim genius grant. Overall, the Guggenheim looks pretty Asymptote-friendly this year: another friend of Asymptote and translationista Susan Bernofsky has also snagged the prestigious award (see the whole list of nominees here). It just feels good to see Asymptote-rs doing big things: here, the Boston Review interviews Korean poet Kim Kyung Ju alongside a few of his translated poems (translator: Jake Levine); Asymptote ran some of his poetry in our July 2013 issue.
All’s fair in art and protest. In Baghdad, Iraq, books and libraries extend hope in rekindling a literary heritage. At the Guardian, Johnathan Jones cruelly suggests boycotting Russian art to “hit Putin where it hurts” (we do not endorse this idea!). In Egypt, crowdsourced social media ventures meet “Monuments Men,” bringing attention to one museum’s brutal looting. In India, theatre is a historic means of processing political upheaval: on struggling with fundamentalism and censorship on the stage. In the wake of NSA and media surveillance controversies, PEN America has mapped the metaphorically loaded vocabulary of surveillance: the United States took cues from Sauron rather than Big Brother. And French sadists can rejoice: Marquis de Sade’s handwritten 120 Days of Sodom returns to Europe at last.
Finally, April means National Poetry Month is upon those in the United States (for everyone else: shouldn’t it be poetry month, every month?!). The Academy of American Poets has launched a Poem-a-Day project, reintroducing the prospect of a sort of daily poem devotional. Given the pseudo-poetic language of texting: the prospect of a nationwide quotidian poetry ritual doesn’t, like, sound too bad.