Category: words

“Poet, writer and musician Joy Harjo — a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation — often draws on Native American stories, languages and myths. But she says that she’s not self-consciously trying to bring that material into her work. If anything, it’s the other way around.” – NPR

“These days, the question driving the debate is whether publishers should sell ebooks to libraries at a higher price for a perpetual license, or at a lower price for a license that needs to be renewed,” with several major publishers moving from the former to the latter model. – Melville House

According to García Turza, if the Suso monks were the first to record the sounds of the Ibero-Romance language on the page, they are also responsible for the creation of the Spanish alphabet. – BBC

Elizabeth Acevedo, a Dominican-American who got her literary start at poetry slams, won the 2019 Carnegie Medal for her verse novel The Poet X. Jackie Morris won the Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration for The Lost Words, about words that were removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary because they supposedly aren’t used enough by children. – The Guardian

Two Dubai-resident Sudanese who met at a poetry event in Abu Dhabi (because there was no such thing in Dubai) have joined forces to open Blank Space, where they’ve basically created a spoken-poetry scene in the city. – Gulf News

There are Welsh-language songs and TV series racking up remarkable streaming numbers, the number of speakers has increased by 20% over the last decade, and people who’ve never been to Wales are learning the language using apps. – The Guardian

“The traditional historical photo of [Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis] shows a man whose skin is nearly as light as his crisp white dress shirt. … Machado was known to be the descendant of freed slaves, but the new rendering, which shows him as a black man, has shaken Brazilians, prompting some to reconsider how they previously read his work and angering others who feel his legacy had been whitewashed.” – The New York Times

“I remember more experienced writers telling me that I should say yes to every opportunity until I had earned the privilege to say no. But hope is both a strength and a weakness; it takes time to learn the difference between those who feed it and those who feed off of it. I wish someone had told me that early-career writers are the cheap gas on which much of the writing business runs.” – The New Yorker

The short story is on a huge upwards trajectory, yet attitudes persist that collections can’t be as successful as novels. To be fair, most of those prehistoric views emanate from London rather than Ireland or the US. After all, it was we Irish who exported the short story to the US in the first place, and it’s our biggest cultural legacy – next to the Irish bar, of course. – Irish Times