Library of Virginia Literary Awards

The Library of Virginia and the Library of Virginia Foundation is currently accepting nominations for the 2008 Library of Virginia Literary Awards for books published in the calendar year 2007. These awards honor outstanding Virginia authors and books about Virginia in the areas of fiction, nonfiction and poetry.

Here are the 2007 winners...

Deborah Eisenberg for Twilight of the Superheroes (Fiction)

Scott Reynolds Nelson for Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry for The Untold Story of an American Legend (Non-fiction)

Elizabeth Leigh Palmer Hadaway for Fire Baton (Poetry)

Tom Wolfe received the lifetime achievement award.

Past winners include Donald McCaig, Eric Pankey, Suzanne Lebsock, Carrie Brown, Charles Wright, Richard Bausch, Ruth Stone, Melvin Patrick Ely, and Edward P. Jones. View a complete list of past Literary Awards finalists and winners here. The winners in each category received a $3,000 prize and a handsome engraved crystal book.

The 2008 finalists will be honored and the winners announced at the 11th Annual Library of Virginia Awards Celebration Honoring Virginia Authors and Friends, to be held on Saturday, October 18, 2008.

To nominate a book, please visit the Library of Virginia.

Catherine O'Flynn Wins 2007 Costa First Novel Award

As an aspiring novelist, I have been asked a couple of times what my greatest challenge is in my career as a writer (currently working on a fiction thriller about an immigrant...). My answer has always been: getting a publisher! You probably consider that too as a major challenge and perhaps get discouraged and disheartened.

But negative emotions like that could dash one's dream to become an author, especially when several publishing agents have rejected your work. Some who are fortunate get accepted after writing to just a few agents. Good for them.

For one thing, most publishers are looking for what would sell big time. After all, that's why they are in business. So if that piece of work that you have labored for gets rejected once, twice, three times...maybe more, should you quit?

Do you really want to quit? Ok. Before you decide, read about the winner of the 2007 Costa first novel award, Catherine O'Flynn who got published after being rejected by 14 separate literary agents.

O'Flynn's novel, What Was Lost, was named winner of the 2007 Costa first novel award after being longlisted for the Booker and the Orange prizes, and shortlisted for the Guardian's first book award.

(See the winner of the 2007 Booker prize and the winner of the 2007 Orange prize).

Interestingly, the 2007 Guardian's first book award was won by Ethiopian-American Dinaw Mengestu with his novel, Children of the Revolution, that tackles fraught questions of identity, dislocation and loneliness through the life of an Ethiopian émigré in the US.

Hopefully, these few examples could motivate you to fulfill your desire to become an author and possibly a best-selling author.

Tom Wolfe Drops Long-term Deal With Farrar, Straus & Giroux

As we see in the entertainment industry where artists could end a music deal with their record companies, so we see today in the world of writers and publishing houses.

According to the New York Times, Tom Wolfe, the author of social genre novels such as “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “A Man in Full,” has severed his 42-year publishing relationship with Farrar, Straus & Giroux and has agreed to sell the rights to Little, Brown & Company to publish his next novel, “Back to Blood”.

Yeah, that's right. 42.

This news has sparked a lot of interest amongst publishing houses and their executives who viewed Mr. Wolfe and Farrar, Straus & Giroux's long-term relationship as "loyal". So that brings the question...who was unfaithful?

Reports reveal that a possible reason for the split could be as a result of the disappointment that Wolfe's last novel “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” published in 2004 which did not sell nearly as much as Mr. Wolfe's previous novels. The book about a sheltered freshman at a big university who throws herself into a life of frat parties and casual sex, received mixed reviews.

Interestingly, established writers who have spent many years with one publisher and then have a disappointing book often end up moving to a new publisher because the advances they demand become too high for the existing publisher. Even Stephen King famously left his longtime publisher, Viking, for Scribner when Viking balked at the $18 million advance he wanted for the novel, “Bag of Bones.”

The Wolfe/Farrar, Straus & Giroux split is so real that the link to the about page of FSG from tomwolfe.com cannot be found.

Wow!

Novels Of The Month: January 2008

As novel readers usher in the new year, it would be nice to know what books to anticipate reading and I'm glad to give you a scoop on WritersCrunch. Starting from January, you can find new novels as well as updates on them. Perhaps your favorite novel might just be eyeing the bestseller lists. So why not keep an eye here:)

This year begins with...



Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink, the international bestseller of The Reader (Der Vorleser in German). Homecoming is the story of one man's odyssey and another man's pursuit. As a child, his narrator becomes obsessed with an incomplete manuscript about a German POW; as an adult, he goes in search of the missing ending - and his own father, also apparently killed in the war. It's a quest for identity, forgiveness and love.


In The Appeal, John Grisham's new legal thriller after The Broker, a powerful, timely, and shocking story of political and legal intrigue is told by the master himself. A story that will leave readers unable to think about the U.S. electoral process or judicial system in quite the same way ever again.




Russell Banks's new novel, The Reserve, is set in the Adirondack Mountains in 1936; a character loosely based on the artist Rockwell Kent is beguiled by a beautiful but mentally unstable heiress. Trust Banks!





Crusaders by Richard T Kelly is an impressive debut. Set in 1996, it sees a young clergyman struggling to set up a church in a deprived part of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Kelly reflects in energetic, muscular prose on the history of the Labor movement and foreshadows the huge social change to come.



In The Flowers, Dagoberto Gilb, who won the PEN/Hemingway award for The Magic of Blood, writes of a Mexican-American boy navigating the hazards of race, class, and poverty.





Sue Miller's The Senator's Wife is about the private lives of two women with a mesmerizing portrait of two marriages exposed in all their shame and imperfection, and in their obdurate, unyielding love. The author of the iconic The Good Mother and the best-selling While I Was Gone brings her marvelous gifts to a powerful story of two unconventional women who unexpectedly change each other’s lives.


In What I Was, the first adult novel by Meg Rosoff, the elderly first-person narrator recalls an intense boyhood relationship.





If you know of any interesting novel to look out for this January, please feel free to leave them in the comments section.

Happy Reading!

WriteCrunchers...Bienvenue au 2008!

Well, now that every part of the world has welcomed 2008...Australia, Japan, France, South Africa, United Kingdom, United States of America, Canada...it gives me great pleasure to be writing my first post of the year!

This blog started off on October 27, 2007 and posted 60 posts in the last year. This year, it's going to get better. I hope to keep improving on the content of WritersCrunch and would welcome your suggestions, comments and feedback.

Please feel free to email me your suggestions, questions, etc Also, if you are interested in having me blog about you or your site or blog, you can simply send me an email.

Bienvenue!


Photo Credits: (Sean Kilpatric / THE CANADIAN PRESS)