Prize Season (Republic of Consciousness, Whitings, Jhalaks, & Windham Campbell)

I've titled this post "Prize Season," but when it comes to literary awards in the US and UK, I should be more precise in noting that various honors now appear in a steadily rolling tide from January through December. Since they now tend not to go to the same author or presses, unless there's a consensus book or candidate whom the zeitgeist homes in on, this unfurling calendar is a good thing, especially for writers and independent publishers who tend to remain under the radar.

One such award is the UK-based Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, founded by writer and publisher Neil Griffiths and now in its second season. Griffiths established the prize to highlight innovative fiction by independent publishers, and more specifically as the prize's name indicates, to reward work that delves deeply into the consciousness of its characters, the worlds it creates. So far he and his jury have managed to do that, generating considerable excitement about British and Irish small press novels and collections of short stories. The Republic of Consciousness Prize proceeds from a fall longlist to a shortlist, and then names a winner early the next year. This year, the shortlist comprised the following six books:

Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz, tr. Sarah Moses & Carolina Orloff (Charco Press)
Gaudy Bauble by Isabel Waidner (Dostoevsky Wannabe)
Blue Self-Portrait by Noémi Lefebvre, tr. Sophie Lewis (Les Fugitives)
We that are Young by Preti Taneja (Galley Beggar Press)
Attrib. and other stories by Eley Williams (Influx Press)
Darker with the Lights on by David Hayden (Little Island Press)

As tally shows, the prize also encompasses works in translation, a rarity among most prize competitions that are not specifically so designated. This year's winner was Influx Press, which published British writer Eley Williams' highly praised Attrib. and other stories. Williams' book has received extensive praise for its playfulness and profundity. Congratulations to the press and Williams, and I highly recommend her collection! (I should add that last year, my British publisher, Fitzcarraldo received the award for Counternarratives, a turn of events I still find astonishing; though I've met Jacques Testard, the founder and head of Fitzcarraldo, I do hope one of these days to return to the UK and participate in a reading over there.)

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Another set of honors that graces the first quarter of each year are the Whiting Awards, awarded by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation in New York. Since 1985, the Whitings have been given annual to ten emerging writers of promise, who are secretly nominated by figures in the literary and publishing world, and then selected by the foundation. This year's winners include some of the brightest new lights in contemporary American poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama:

• poet and essayist Anne Boyer
• fiction writer Patti Yumi Cottrell
• playwright Nathan Alan Davis
• playwright and director Hansol Jung
• poet Rickey Laurentiis
• playwright Antoinette Nwandu
• poet Tommy Pico
• author, dancer, performance artist, and musician Brontez Purnell
• novelist Esmé Weijun Wang
• fiction writer and public health scholar Weike Wang

2018 Whiting Award winners

Congratulations to all these writers and artists, and you can learn more about them and find links to their books at the Whiting site, linked above!

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2017 Jhalak Prize shortlisted titles

Several years ago, authors Sunny Singh and Nikesh Shukla, working with the organization Media Diversified, and with the support of the Authors' Club and an anonymous donor, established the Jhalak Prize to honor outstanding writing by writers of color, or in British terminology, British and British-resident BAME (Black, Asian and Middle Eastern) writers. This is the only prize of its sort presented in Great Britain. The jury selects a longlist, shortlist, and then one winner, who receives a £1000 ($1413) prize. Like the Republic of Consciousness Prize, this was the Jhalak Prize's second iteration; last year, Jacob Ross received the inaugural prize for The Bone Readers (Peepal Tree Press), a crime thriller set in the Caribbean.

This year, on March 15, author Reni Eddo-Lodge received the 2017 Jhalak Prize for her collection of essays Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race (Bloomsbury Circus). The Guardian described Eddo-Lodge's process of writing the book, which began with...a blog post!

Eddo-Lodge’s collection of essays began as a blogpost of the same title in 2014. Opening with her statement: “I’m no longer engaging with white people on the topic of race,” Eddo-Lodge wrote she could “no longer engage with the gulf of an emotional disconnect that white people display when a person of colour articulates our experiences. You can see their eyes shut down and harden. It’s like treacle is poured into their ears, blocking up their ear canals like they can no longer hear us.”

After the blog went viral, Eddo-Lodge spent five years writing the book about “not just the explicit side, but also the slippery side of racism – the bits that are hard to define, and the bits that make you doubt yourself”. Britain, she wrote, “is still profoundly uncomfortable with race and difference”.

Other writers on the shortlist include

• Nadeem Aslam, The Golden Legend (Faber)
• Kayo Chingonyi, Kumukanda (Chatto & Windus) 
• Xiaolu Guo, Once Upon a Time in the East (Chatto & Windus)
• Meena Kandasamy, When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (Atlantic Books)
• Kiran Millwood-Hargrave, The Island at the End of Everything (Chicken House)

Congratulations to Reni Eddo-Lodge, whose book I'm looking forward to reading, and to all of this year's Jhalak Prize-listed authors and titles!

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Last but not least, I recently learned that I was among the newest cohort of recipients of this year's Windham Campbell Prizes, administered by the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Like the Whiting Awards, recipients cannot apply for these awards; a committee selects prize recipients from a set of nominees.

This year's recipients also include:

• Sarah Bakewell, a nonfiction writer from the UK;
• Lorna Goodison, a poet from Jamaica and Canada (who taught for many years in the US);
• Lucas Hnath, a playwright and actor from the US;
• Cathy Park Hong, a poet, essayist and my new Rutgers-Newark colleague, from the US;
• Olivia Laing, a nonfiction writer from the UK;
• Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, a fiction writer from Uganda and the UK; and
• Suzan-Lori Parks, one of the major living US playwrights.

The prize committee calls out of the blue, so this award was even more of a surprise than usual. Additionally, for each recipient, they write a citation; mine, which was awarded for Fiction, reads, "With coruscating imagination, language and thought, John Keene experiments with concealed scenes from history and literature, stepping outside the confines of conventional narrative." That's about as fine and concise a summation of nearly all my work as anyone might devise.

Congratulations to all of my fellow Windham Campbell Prize recipients, many thanks to the nominators, prize committee, and foundation! There will be a series of events, including a prize ceremony, this upcoming September, so I will be sure to post more then.

Fitzcarraldo Wins Republic of Consciousness Prize for *Counternarratives*!

Republic of Consciousness
Prize Announcement

Yesterday evening in a cozy room in London, as I moved through my usual Thursday workday, meeting with students and giving a mid-term exam in Newark, the ceremony for the inaugural Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses was underway. Last fall I blogged about this new prize, which author and publisher Neil Griffiths established to honor smaller British presses that took the financial risk, which is substantial, of publishing more formally and thematically challenging writing. As the RoCP's initial announcement stated, the prize selection criteria could be boiled down to two elements, "hardcore literary fiction and gorgeous prose." In November the British edition of Counternarratives, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, was named to its longlist, and subsequently its shortlist of eight finalists in January.

Neil Griffiths, speaking to RoCP's
ceremony audience, Fyvie Hall

At the packed London ceremony in Fyvie Hall on Regents Street, Griffiths, accompanied by the judges, and in the presence of the nominated publishers and their staff, journalists, writers, editors, and other members of the British literary world, announced that Fitzcarraldo was the winner of the first Republic of Consciousness Prize for Counternarratives! In their unanimous decision, the six-judge jury described the collection as a "once in a generation achievement for short-form fiction," and lauded its "subject matter, formal inventiveness, multitude of voices, and seriousness of purpose." Fitzcarraldo publisher Jacques Testard and Fitzcarraldo PR guru Nicolette Praça were there to accept the prize, and Testard offered remarks about the award's importance for Fitzcarraldo and for small presses in the UK and everywhere.

Fitzcarraldo received the top £3000 prize, and the shortlist finalists, which were Tramp Press, which published Briton Mike McCormack’s novel Solar Bones (winner of the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize) and & Other Stories, which published Irish-Canadian author Anakana Schofield’s novel Martin John, each received £1000. In addition, publisher Galley Beggar received the Best First Novel or Collection Prize and £1000 for UK author Paul Stanbridge’s Forbidden Line, which Griffiths praised for its "multitudinous energy." The Guardian wrote up the ceremony; you can find the article here. Publishing site The Bookseller also wrote about the prize here. You can also hear Testard and Griffiths spoke about the award and small presses in a radio interview on the Robert Elms show on BBC Radio London (beginning at 1:09:20).

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I've never had the pleasure of meeting Jacques Testard in person, but he, Nicolette Praça and everyone affiliated with Fitzcarraldo have been a dream to work with, and I am very thankful that he took the leap of publishing my book. (And especially delighted still in the press's choice of Yves Klein International Blue for its fiction covers!) Many thanks also to the prize jury, who unanimously chose Counternarratives, and once again, a million thanks to Neil Griffiths for establishing the award, for his work as an author and publisher, and for his advocacy of small-press publishing.

Contemporary Black Canvas Podcast + Counternarratives News: January 2017

For years I've regularly listened to literature and ideas podcasts but have long felt about far too many posted by mainstream US institutions lack any real diversity, some hosting lineups of invited artists and thinkers so un-diverse that it would be dishonest to describe them as practicing anything but intellectual, literary and cultural apartheid. Fortunately these days are increasingly more options, one of which I learned about last fall: Contemporary Black Canvas. Hosted by founder Dr. Pia Deas, a literature professor and scholar at HBCU Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and available on the iTunes store and via the net (for your laptop), Contemporary Black Canvas aims, as Deas states on the sites landing page, to celebrate

the depth and breadth of the Black artistic and intellectual traditions from across the African Diaspora and Africa. Through conversations with leading writers, musicians, filmmakers, visual artists, dancers, radical gardeners, and institution builders, we examine the Black imagination as a vital, vibrant, and dynamic force for individual and collective transformation.

Generocity's Dante Kirby wrote an informative article about Deas and Contemporary Black Canvas, which I recommend. So far Contemporary Black Canvas has challenged black underrepresentation on the podcast front by hosting a rich array of contemporary cultural producers, including culinary artist Pascale Boucicaut and photographer Adachi Pimentel, curator and festival organizer Maori Karamel Holmes, visual artist Akili Ron Anderson, multiplatform artists Mendi+Keith Obadike, dancer and choreographer Lela Aisha Jones, and Poet Laureate of Philadelphia Yolanda Wisher. Most recently she invited me to participate in a conversation about Counternarratives and my work in general, and it was a wonderful experience (even if I do sound a bit of a spaz!). I really appreciated for the opportunity.

Please do consider adding the podcasts to add to your mix, and enjoy!

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I recently received the very good news that Counternarratives had made the shortlist for the inaugural Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses! I'd previously written about the crowdfunded prize and how my collection made the longlist, which comprised some twenty works, many experimental in form and content, by independent publishers in the UK. The Guardian features a short writeup about the shortlist of 8 books, evenly divided between novels and short story collections, including a nice mention of Counternarratives. However it goes, many thanks to the judges and especially Neil Griffiths for establishing this way to honor small presses.

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Another positive mention for Counternarratives appeared in LitHub's list of the "Most Important Books of the Last 20 Years." One of the judges deemed the collection worthy of inclusion, so many thanks to whoever among that illustrious list selected my book. After reading through the list, which is long on imaginative literature (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, a few academic and journalistic books), a good thing, I think, but a bit short on scholarly books, so I posed the question on Twitter, which scholarly books published in the last 20 years would you list as the most important or influential? Please leave your suggestions in the comments section.

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Two recent reviews, one extended, the second brief, of the French edition of Counternarratives have been published. The longer one, by Juan Asensio, appeared on STALKER of Counternarratives / ContrenarrationsContrenarrations. Probing and laudatory, it also manages to broach some aspects of the book that haven't been touched upon at all in most of the books reviews, in the US or British press, including the book's exploration of marranos and conversos during the Inquisition era, and invokes figures ranging from Siegfried Kracauer to Leo Strauss (!) in discussing some of the ideas it contains. It's a wonderful piece, and I really appreciate that Juan Asensio engaged with the book so deeply.

French novelist Florence Noiville wrote a mini-review for major French daily Le Monde's book section, as part of their year-end 28 "Books in brief" section. She describes me as a "new voice in African American literature," which isn't really the case, but ends with "And to follow closely," which was nice. I hope French readers will do so, and buy the book.

Lastly, in Mediapart, Lisa Wajeman makes the case in her article "L'histoire noire américaine est devenue un sujet littéraire," which, based on French historian's Sylvain Pattieu's Nous avons arpenté un chemin caillouteux (We Have Walked Along a Stony Path), which explores Black Panthers Jean and Melvin McNair's 1972 hijacking of a plane to Algeria; Nate Parker's film Birth of a Nation, and translations of Ta-Nehisi Coates's meditative critical essay Between the World and Me and Counternarratives, African American literature has over the past year become a literary subject...in France. One fine touch is Wajeman's use of the concept of "counternarratives " to frame not only my book, but all the works under discussion.

"Employment of whites and black people in Georgia, and
"Enslaved and free black people between 1790-1870,"
color plates from W. E. B. DuBois, The Georgia Negro:
A Study, 1900. All rights reserved.