Do You Teach Geography?

Ben Ehrenreich is being awarded the American Book Award for Desert Notebooks, which examines how the unprecedented pace of destruction to our environment and an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape have led us to the brink of a calamity greater than any humankind has confronted before. Ehrenreich draws on the stark grandeur of the desert to ask

Carolyn Forché is being awarded the American Book Award for In the Lateness of the World, a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination

Martin Hägglund’s book This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom has won the René Wellek Prize for the best book in the field by the American Comparative Literature Association. Winners of this award include Umberto Eco and Edward Said.   The awards committee in their citation offered high praise for This Life: “Martin Hägglund’s This

We celebrate THE FRIEND by Sigrid Nunez, published by Riverhead, chosen by the panel of five judges from 368 submissions, as the recipient of the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction, announced Wednesday evening, November 14, at the annual National Book Foundation dinner in downtown Manhattan. Sigrid Nunez’s previous literary honors include a Whiting Writer’s Award, and

The one-off award, voted for by the public, commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Man Booker prize. The shortlist of five novels was selected by a panel of judges from the 51 previous winners of the Man Booker, which honors the best novels written in English and published in Britain or Ireland. “The English Patient

Flights, a “non-traditional” narrative by acclaimed Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, has won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, awarded annually to a fiction work judged to be the year’s outstanding work of translated fiction. Translator Jennifer Croft will share the 50,000 pound prize with Tokarczuk.

Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard announced the winners of the 2018 J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards, including the Mark Lynton History Prize for Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941, published by Penguin Press.

Israel’s Education Ministry announced that celebrated author, David Grossman, has been awarded the Israel Prize—the country’s highest literary accolade—for this year.   The prize committee, led by Prof. Avner Holtzman, noted that “since the early ’80s, Grossman has taken center stage in the Israeli culture scene. He is one of the most profound, moving and influential

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City I began this project because I wanted to write a different kind of book about poverty in America. Instead of focusing exclusively on poor people or poor places, I began searching for a process that involved poor and well-off people alike. Eviction—the forced removal of families from

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded by the Swedish Academy to the English author Kazuo Ishiguro “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”

Jhumpa Lahiri has won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. She will receive the $5,000 award and give a reading December 8 at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

The 2017 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced on Monday and four Penguin Random House titles received the distinguished medal honoring excellence in Arts and Letters.