Former permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Sara Danius has died at age 57, the New York Times reports. Danius “was the first woman to lead” the academy and “played a central role in the hotly debated decision” to award the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan. Danius resigned in 2018 after another academy member was accused of sexual assault by eighteen women.
The TS Eliot Prize shortlist has been announced. Nominees include Jay Bernard’s Surge, Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, and Sharon Olds’s Arias. The winner will be announced in January.
Ismail Kadare has won the 2020 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
At Longreads, Victoria Namkung talks to Steph Cha about crime fiction, Los Angeles, and her new novel, Your House Will Pay. “I thought it would be cool if somebody wrote a Korean American contemporary take on a Raymond Chandler novel,” Cha said of her book, which is based on the 1991 murder of Latasha Harlins. “I never saw Korean American LA, and that’s such a huge community, and one that I know really well.”
For Literary Hub, Sarah Neilson talks to Cyrus Grace Dunham about gender, the struggles of autobiography, and their new book, A Year Without a Name. “The way that I remember that period of time has been deeply shaped by the story that ended up being told. In many ways it is deep and true, but in other ways it was shaped by arbitrary factors like whatever mood I was in on a certain day, whatever mood my editor was in on a certain day, whatever the previous paragraph necessitated about the next paragraph,” they said. “The law of writing now dictates how I understand that period of time. I think that is a huge risk when it comes to documenting our own stories.”
Entertainment Weekly offers a first look at the photos and documents that will be included in Prince’s posthumous book, The Beautiful Ones.
