Marilynne Robinson has won the Richard C. Holbrooke award for her writing, which Dayton Literary Peace Prize founder Sharon Rab praised for being “concerned with the issues that define the . . . prize: forgiveness, the sacredness of the human creature and delight in being alive and experiencing the natural world.” PEN Center USA announced the 2016 Literary Award winners, including a prize for journalists T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong for their investigation, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” for ProPublica and the Marshall Project.
Translator Deborah Smith, who along with author Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian this year, has started her own publishing house in London. Tilted Axis Press will focus on translated works from Asian languages that Smith feels are underrepresented in commercial publishing, “in a way that makes it clear that this is art, not anthropology.”
“With the surge in cell phone usage and the increasing obsolescence of landlines in recent years,” the days of telephone polling might be numbered, and the New York Times–CBS News poll is rumored to be the first to go.
The deadline for an essay contest to find a new publisher and editor for Vermont’s Hardwick Gazette, a weekly newspaper, has been extended to September 20 due to a low number of entries.
R.C. Baker remembers the Village Voice’s Richard Kopperdahl, who died earlier this week. Kopperdahl was known for his first-person writing about his time spent in Bellevue Hospital’s Psychiatric Ward.
Ramparts magazine editor Warren Hinckle died yesterday. Under Hinckle’s leadership, the magazine went from a publication for left-leaning Catholics “to a slickly produced, crusading political magazine that galvanized the American left.” Ramparts published the diaries of Che Guevara, Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, and photo essays detailing the violence experienced by Vietnamese civilians during the war.
