Category: words

Edugyan secured the top prize after a season flush with acclaim for Washington Black, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Writers’ Trust fiction award.

When the Writers’ Union of Canada recently surveyed its members about their incomes, the results were sobering: an average writer made $9,380 a year from his or her writing. That’s 27 per cent less than what writers made three years ago, and a whopping 78 per cent less than they made in 1998.  The report comes in stark contrast to the glossy literary awards season, where champagne flows and prizes that sound lucrative are given out, culminating with the $100,000 Giller Prize.

As of June, Glamour had a print circulation of about 2 million, according to Alliance for Audited Media. There were about 7 million visitors to the website last month, according to comScore figures. Its total reach online, editor Samantha Barry contended to staffers, was about 20 million.

To begin with, why not a single book from an academic imprint?

“Despite its bad reputation, punning is, in fact, among the highest displays of wit. Indeed, puns point to the essence of all true wit — the ability to hold in the mind two different ideas about the same thing at the same time. And the pun’s primacy is demonstrated by its strategic use in the oldest sacred stories, texts, and myths.” Indeed, the fact that we think Adam and Eve ate an apple is due to a pun.

“In the year 2000, there were seven major teen magazines publishing monthly; now, there are none. This makes me feel incredibly old, but even so: I am glad that teen magazines are dead.” As Seventeen and Teen Vogue, the last survivors of the genre, go out of print, Rebecca Onion argues that this is a healthy development.

The CA$5,000 (£3,000) Prix littéraire des collégiens, running since 2003, is intended to promote Québécois literature and is decided by a jury of hundreds of students who select their winner from a selection of five works of fiction written in French by Canadian authors. But after this year’s finalists, the writers Lula Carballo, Dominique Fortier, Karoline Georges, Kevin Lambert and Jean-Christophe Réhel, discovered that Amazon Canada would be the prize’s new principal sponsor, they wrote to Le Devoir urging organisers to reconsider.

Modernism is inextricably bound to the concept of the West – and now that the United States and Britain are once again reckoning in challenging ways with their places in the world, some of the countries’ novelists are returning to its style and philosophy.

The store in Northwest England has gotten hundreds of replies about selling the book, about William the Conqueror. “Author Sarah Todd Taylor tweeted in response, ‘The book held its breath. It had hoped so often, only to have that hope crushed. Hands lifted it from the shelf, wrapped it warmly in paper. As the door closed on its past life, the book heard the soft cheers of its shelfmates.'”

In an attention economy, controversy has value. It’s no exaggeration to say these political battles within CanLit now dominate the discussion of Canadian writers and writing. The “appropriation prize” controversy, for example, blew up in a journal that few people had ever heard of much less read, and yet it garnered an enormous amount of national media coverage. And, while Joseph Boyden is a bestselling, award-winning novelist, he is probably better known today for questions raised about whether or not he qualifies as an Indigenous author.