PEN America Center, founded in 1922 and based in New York City, works to advance literature, to defend free expression, and to foster international literary fellowship. It has an extensive program of annual awards and fellowships that serve to recognize recent outstanding endeavors in various literary fields and to encourage […]
The Pen/Faulkner Foundation has announced the finalists for the 2014 awards. The award is “a national prize which honors the best published works of fiction by American citizens in a calendar year. Three writers are chosen annually by the directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation to serve as judges for the […]
From THP: NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Ten emerging authors, poets and playwrights have been picked as winners of $50,000 prizes for showing “exceptional talent and promise.” Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner hosted a ceremony in Manhattan on Monday for the Whiting Writers’ Awards. Recipients include fiction writers […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.