⇒Four more regional Commonwealth Prizes were handed out last week. In the African divison, South African novelists took both the best novel (Shaun Johnson‘s The Native Commissioner) and best first novel (Maxine Case‘s All We Have Left Unsaid) categories. (Neither one appeared in Rachel Donadio‘s survey of South African literature, but I suspect there’s nothing significant to be read into the omission.) In the South East Asia and South Pacific division, the best novel prize goes to New Zealander Lloyd Jones for Mister Pip, while Andrew O’Connor of Australia takes the best first novel with Tuvalu—which appears to be coming to America in an imported edition from Allen & Unwin in the next month or so; none of the other three aave a US book deal as far as we can tell. All the winners, including those previously announced for the Canadian/Caribbean and European/South Asian divisions, will be evaluated for the overall prizes to be decided upon in May.
⇒Canada’s Arsenal Pulp Press has received the Jim Douglas Publisher of the Year Award from the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia. From the same email, we learned that Desert of the Heart author Jane Rule was one of six authors to receive this year’s Alice B. Medal, awarded by a semi-anonymous lesbian cabal in Arizona “to reward and thank writers of lesbian fiction for their contribution to the lesbian community, culture, and identity.” The other recipients include NBCC-nominated memoirist Alison Bechdel and the legendary Marijane Meaker, whom readers of a certain age will recognize more readily as M.E. Kerr, and readers of another certain age as Vin Packer.
⇒I wish I could remember which blog I spotted this on, but at least I found Josh Getlin‘s LA Times piece about Elizabeth Alexander winning the first Jackson Poetry Prize, a $50,000 award from Poets & Writers for “an American poet whose work has been critically recognized but has not yet received significant public attention.”