Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has won the 2018 PEN Pinter Prize. “In this age of the privatised, marketised self, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the exception who defies the rule,” English PEN trustees chair Maureen Freely said of the author. “Sophisticated beyond measure in her understanding of gender, race, and global inequality, she guides us through the revolving doors of identity politics, liberating us all.” Adichie will receive the award in October, when she will also announce her choice for the 2018 International Writer of Courage.
Amazon Studios has ordered a streaming series based on the New York Times’s Modern Love column. Written and directed by John Carney, the show “will explore love in its multitude of forms, including sexual, romantic, familial, platonic and self-love.”
Julie Reynolds wonders why the Knight Foundation, a journalism organization that supports local news organizations, invested in Alden Global Capital’s Distressed Opportunities Fund, which was used to buy struggling newspapers and slash their budgets, from 2010 until 2014.
After writing an article claiming that Penguin Random House UK’s plan to increase the diversity of its writers was “putting diversity ahead of literary excellence,” Lionel Shriver has been removed from the judging panel of Mslexia’s writing competition. In an open letter to Shriver, the inaugural cohort of the Penguin WriteNow program, which provides mentoring to writers from marginalized communities, detailed just how hard it is to be selected for such projects. Out of 2,000 applications each year, only twenty-three writers were selected. “In context: statistically you are much more likely to get into Oxford than onto a Penguin Random House mentoring scheme,” they explain. “Therefore it’s hardly the indiscriminate box-ticking process that Shriver so unimaginatively envisages.”
