Portal:Literature/News archive

Old Literature Portal news items are archived in this page.

2012

 * December — In Denmark, the discovery of "The Tallow Candle", a previously unknown story by Hans Christian Andersen, is confirmed. Politiken
 * 16 October — Hilary Mantel wins the 2012 Man Booker Prize for her novel Bring Up the Bodies, becoming the first British writer to win the award twice, and the first female to do so. BBC
 * 11 October — Mo Yan is awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature. Xinhua
 * July — Jaime García Márquez tells his students that his brother Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian writer and recipient of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature, suffers from dementia that has ended his writing career. Guardian
 * 13 June — Jon McGregor wins the 2012 International Dublin Literary Award for his novel Even the Dogs. Guardian
 * April — While attending the London Book Fair, exiled Chinese writer Ma Jian uses red paint to smear a cross over his face and a copy of his banned book Beijing Coma and calls Chinese publishers a "mouthpiece of the Chinese communist party" after being "manhandled" while attempting to present the book to Liu Binjie at the fair. Guardian
 * February — James Joyce's children's story The Cats of Copenhagen is published for the first time by Ithys Press in Dublin. BBC

2011

 * 6 October - The 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature goes to Tomas Tranströmer. Guardian
 * 6 September - Shortlist for the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction is announced. themanbookerprize.com
 * 19 April - A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan wins the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Guardian
 * 19 April - A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan wins the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Guardian

2010

 * 16 November - The 2010 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction is awarded to Dianne Warren for Cool Water. vancouversun.com
 * 7 October - Peruvian-Spanish writer Mario Vargas Llosa wins the Nobel Prize in Literature.
 * 18 June - Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese author José Saramago dies at the age of 87.
 * 28 April - China Miéville won the UK's most prestigious science fiction prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, for an unprecedented third time. Guardian
 * 17 January - Author Erich Segal (Love Story) dies of a heart attack.  Guardian

2009

 * 17 November - Jon Meacham's American Lion won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
 * 22 September - English poet and playwright Tony Harrison has won the inaugural PEN/Pinter prize. Guardian
 * 25 August - The Hugo Awards for the best science fiction or fantasy were given, Hugo Award for Best Novel went to Neil Gaiman for The Graveyard Book. worldswithoutend.com
 * 25 August - Michael Holroyd was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his biography A Strange Eventful History. Guardian
 * 3 June - American author Marilynne Robinson wins the Orange Prize for Fiction for her novel, Home. BBC
 * 26 May - Alice Munro won the £60,000 Man Booker International Prize. Guardian
 * 19 April - British novelist J. G. Ballard dies aged 78.
 * 17 February - British writer Edward Upward dies aged 105. Wikinews
 * 27 January - Pulitzer prize-winning American novelist John Updike dies from lung cancer aged 76. Guardian

2008

 * 4 December - The 2008 Finlandia Prize is awarded to Sofi Oksanen for Puhdistus.
 * 11 November - The Vietnamese Australian writer Nam Le is awarded the 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize for The Boat. Guardian
 * 14 October - Indian writer Aravind Adiga wins the 2008 Man Booker Prize.
 * 9 October - French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio wins the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature.
 * 3 August - Soviet-era dissident and Nobel Prize-winning writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dies.
 * 12 July - Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie is awarded The Best of the Booker, as the best novel to have won a Man Booker Prize in the first 40 years of its existence.
 * 4 May - Richard Morgan's Black Man wins the 2008 Arthur C. Clarke Award. (Guardian)
 * 14 March - Novelist Kate Christensen has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her novel The Great Man. (Guardian)
 * 24 January - The University of Texas Norman Mailer archive opens to public. Guardian
 * 23 January - The Nestlé Smarties Book Prize is discontinued as of 2008. Guardian

2007

 * 20 December - The 2007 Nestlé Smarties Book Prize in the 9-11 age category goes to Matt Haig's Shadow Forest. Guardian
 * 19 November - Marvel Comics is putting some of its older comics online. Guardian, Marvel
 * 19 November - Chile has returned 3,778 books that its military had taken from Peru's national library more than 126 years ago. Guardian
 * 11 October - Doris Lessing wins the Nobel Prize in Literature. (NPR.org)
 * 6 September - Madeleine L'Engle (born November 29, 1918) the American writer best known for her children's books, particularly the Newbery Medal-winning A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet and Many Waters has died of natural causes on September 6, 2007. (Nytimes.com)
 * 25 August - American writer Cormac McCarthy has been awarded this year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction for his novel The Road. (Prize's homepage)
 * 7 August - Longlist for the 2007 Man Booker Prize has been revealed. The shortlist will be announced on the 6th of September, and the winner will be known on the 16th of October. (Themanbookerprize.com - list)
 * 21 July - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final book in the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling, is released worldwide.
 * 1 July - A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is at #1 in the US Bestseller list. (Suntimes.com)
 * 15 June - The Nigerian novelist and poet Chinua Achebe has won the 2007 Man Booker International Prize. (bloomberg.com)
 * 14 June - This year's Impac award goes to Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses. (award page; Guardian)
 * 25 May - Lucille Clifton has been awarded the $100,000 2007 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. (prnewswire)
 * 11 May - The 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize winners were announced, A Woman in Jerusalem by A. B. Yehoshua won in the fiction category. (L. A. Times Book Prizes)
 * 25 April - Peter Hennessy's Having It So Good: Britain in the 1950s won the 2007 Orwell Prize for political writing. (Guardian)
 * 18 April - The 2007 winners of America's most prestigious literary award, the Pulitzer Prize are The Road by Cormac McCarthy (fiction); Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire (drama); Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey (poetry); The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright (general non-fiction).
 * 11 April - Kurt Vonnegut, author of the classic Slaughterhouse-Five, dies after having fallen several weeks ago and receiving brain injuries. He was 84. (BBC News)
 * 10 April - This year's Ineternational Dublin Literary Award shortlist of eight candidates is released. It includes Julian Barnes, J. M. Coetzee, Jonathan Safran Foer and Salman Rushdie. The winner will be announced on June 14, 2007. (award page; Guardian)
 * 30 March - The 2007 Hugo Award nominees have been named. The winners will be announced at the 65th Worldcon, Aug. 3 - Sep. 3, in Yokohama, Japan.(scifi.com)
 * 19 March - The 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction longlist is announced. (Orange Prize)
 * 12 March - The diaries of Charles Darwin's wife have been published online, giving an insight into his life. (darwin-online.org.uk)
 * 26 February - Philip Roth is awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. (Guardian)
 * 20 February - Susan Patron's children's book The Higher Power of Lucky is banned for a single word in some U.S. schools. (Guardian)
 * 1 February - J. K. Rowlings' Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last of seven instalments, will be published on 21 July. (Guardian)
 * 17 January - Nanae Aoyama wins the Akutagawa Prize for her novel Hitori Biyori. (ABC Radio)
 * 17 January - British playwright and Nobel laureate Harold Pinter is awarded the Legion d'Honneur by the French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin.(Guardian)
 * 15 January - Seamus Heaney won the 2006 T. S. Eliot Prize with his latest collection, District and Circle. (Guardian)

2006

 * 26 December - John Heath-Stubbs, holder of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and renowned as a classical poet, died of cancer in London. He was 88. (Guardian)
 * 6 December - Yiyun Li's A Thousand Years of Good Prayers won the Guardian First Book Award. (Guardian)
 * December - The British novelist Paul Ableman, writer of much erotic fiction and novelizations, died on 25 October. (Guardian)
 * 29 November - The 2006 Costa Book Awards (formerly Whitbread Book Awards) shortlist has been announced. (CBA site)
 * 19 November - The 2007 International Dublin Literary Award has announced its longlist of 138 novels. (Award homepage, Guardian)
 * 16 November - The 2006 National Book Awards' fiction prize went to Richard Powers for his The Echo Maker, Nathaniel Mackey got the poetry prize for his poetry collection Splay Anthem and the nonfiction prize was awarded to Timothy Egan for The Worst Hard Time. (The National Book Foundation)
 * 9 November - The 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize has been given to Vincent Lam for his debut work Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. (Award site)
 * 6 November - American writer Jonathan Littell won the 2006 Prix Goncourt, for his work Les Bienveillantes (Les Bienveillantes). (The Burnt Ones blog)
 * 1 November - William Styron, American Pulitzer Prize-winning (The Confessions of Nat Turner) writer dies. (Vineyard Gazette)
 * 30 October - The Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer was robbed by thieves who assaulted her in her Johannesburg home last week. She was unharmed. (Guardian)
 * 17 October - Microsoft announced it will start in 2007 a Live Book Search portal project, a competitor to Google's similar search. (Guardian)
 * 12 October - Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk wins the 2006 Nobel Prize in literature. (Aljazeera.Net)
 * 11 October - The Inheritance of Loss, the second novel by Indian author Kiran Desai, wins the 2006 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. (BBC)
 * 8 October - Haruki Murakami has won the second Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award (€35,000) for Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. (Guardian)
 * 8 October - A poem, written in 1918, by Robert Frost has been rediscovered by a student in Virginia. (Guardian)
 * 25 September - The 2006 Man Booker Prize shortlist was announced on the 14 Sept. (themanbookerprize.com)
 * 23 September - The Children of Hurin, a Middle Earth tale abandoned by J. R. R. Tolkien in 1918, has been completed by his son and will be published in the spring of 2007. (Guardian)
 * 21 September - The bestselling Turkish novelist Elif Shafak was acquitted of the charges of "insulting Turkishness" for lack of evidence. (Guardian)
 * August - More Americans know who Harry Potter is than Tony Blair, survey finds. (Guardian)
 * 30 August - The Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz dies at the age of 94. (Guardian)
 * 24 August - Guardian First Book Award shortlist announced (Guardian)
 * 10 August - University of California joins Google's book-scanning project (Guardian/Associated Press)
 * The 2006 Akutagawa Prize went to Takami Itō for Throwing Stuff Away on a Road in August (八月の路上に捨てる Hachigatsu no rojō ni suteru)
 * 31 July - Austria has awarded its annual state prize for European literature to Italian writer Claudio Magris, who is best known for his works Danubio (”The Danube”, 1986) and Microcosmi (”Microcosmos”, 1997).
 * 27 July - Lists of best-selling books in the US (Associated Press)
 * 20 July - Lists of best-selling books in the US (Associated Press)
 * 17 July - Mike Hammer creator, Mickey Spillane, dies aged 88
 * 13 July - Lists of best-selling books in the US (Associated Press)
 * 12 July - Books of hate found openly on sale in Sydney's Muslim community have been banned after an official finding that they promote suicide operations and violence. (The Daily Telegraph (AUS))
 * 18 June - United States' production of new books declining (Wikinews)

New books

 * December 2006 - Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon's first novel in nearly a decade is coming out in the US (Guardian)
 * September 2006 - Upcoming books: Kingdom Come by J. G. Ballard (Guardian)
 * August 2006 - Upcoming books: Whitethorn Woods by Maeve Binchy (Guardian)
 * 22 June 2006 - Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson (Guardian)