I'm so pleased to hear that Lori Ostlund's The Bigness of the World won the Gold Medal for First Fiction at the California Book Awards, adding that accolade to its Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Ostlund's book is an extraordinary collection of eleven stories, one of my very favorite reads of the last year; it provoked a lot from me in my video book review for The Collagist. I'm hopeful the added honor will bring more readers to it.
Meanwhile, winners of the 29th annual Northern California Book Awards--a separate honor--were announced in a ceremony on Sunday. They include Catherine Brady in fiction for The Mechanics of Falling and Other Stories; Tamim Ansary in general nonfiction for Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes; Dave Eggers in creative nonfiction for Zeitoun; D.A. Powell in poetry for Chronic: Poems; and Nina LaCour for her young adult novel, Hold Still. In the translation categories (!!), John Balcom's translation from the Chinese of Cao Naiqian's novel won, as well as Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld's version of Hovering at a Low Altitude, the collected poems of Dahlia Rvikovitch (originally in Hebrew).
Special CBA honorees were Camille T. Dungy, for editing the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry; and Nancy J. Peters, co-owner and former publisher of City Lights Booksellers and Publishers.
Comments