Jump to navigation Skip to content
During the next several months, a number of festivals, exhibitions, and publications will mark the centennial of Samuel Beckett’s birth. Beckett, the poet, novelist, and playwright who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, was born in Dublin on April 13, 1906.
At this year’s London Book Fair, which was held in early March, novelist Margaret Atwood introduced the LongPen, a device she designed that allows authors to sign books for readers who are hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
Margaret Atwood's invention, the LongPen, which the author unveiled at last year's London Book Fair, will be used at a record store and several bookstores in the United States, Canada, and England, the London Free Press reported today.
Poet Rita Dove was recently named the winner of the $50,000 Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service for Literature.
Barnes & Noble, Inc. recently announced the winners of the 2005 Discover Great New Writers Awards. Uzodinma Iweala won in fiction for his novel Beasts of No Nation (HarperCollins) and Nathaniel Fick won in nonfiction for his memoir One Bullet Away (Houghton Mifflin).
From Thoreau to Arthur Miller for centuries writers have been escaping to personal cabins—some even hand built by the writers themselves—for the solitude necessary to slip inward.
In response to its 2004 report "Reading at Risk," which found that significantly fewer people read serious literature now than in years past, the National Endowment for the Arts recently launched an ambitious program designed to reverse the trend.
