The Hungarian author of Satantango, László Krasznahorkai, has won the biennial Man Booker International Prize in recognition of his body of work. Just as ”now we say, ‘it’s just like being in a Kafka story,’” Marina Warner, the chair of judges, said, “I believe that soon we will say it’s like being in a Krasznahorkai story.” As well as the £60,000 award, there is a £15,000 translators’ prize that will be split between Krasznahorkai’s translators, Ottilie Mulzet and the poet George Szirtes.
Daily Mail North America’s CEO, Jon Steinberg, tells us who he thinks is really “killing the news”: advertisers who don’t want to be seen next to it (wars and the like are apparently “not brand safe”).
At The Millions, Jonathan Clarke makes six observations about Renata Adler, beginning with her self-conception as “perennially Will Kane in High Noon, flinging her press pass into the dirt” (nowadays, Clarke adds of Adler’s ferocious editorial independence and its cost to her career, “a journalist can want her autonomy, or she can want health insurance, but she had better not want both”).
Poet Melissa Broder has come out as the author of the avidly read Twitter feed @sosadtoday, making a concession to Grand Central Publishing, who will bring out a So Sad Today collection of essays next year. Regarding the loss of anonymity, she tells Rolling Stone that she wondered, "Am I ever going to be respected as a poet again?": "But then, as I was hemming and hawing, I got this text message from someone who had just put out yet another self-published chapbook, and it was called Flowers or something and he sent it with flower emojis. So then I was like, 'Fuck it.'"
Justin Marozzi’s history of Baghdad has won the £10,000 Ondaatje prize.
The journal Music & Literature, which publishes three portfolios of the work of artists, writers, and musicians in each issue, has just launched its sixth, and it’s full of treasures. Alongside Dubravka Ugrešić, the Croatian author of The Ministry of Pain, the new issue champions the Ukrainian composer Victoria Polevá, and the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik—as well as previously untranslated prose, diary entries, and letters, there are pieces on Pizarnik by Enrique Vila-Matas, César Aira, and Julio Cortázar, and here you can read part of an interview with her, translated by Bookforum contributor Emily Cooke.
