Comment? A week after Canadian-born Nancy Huston won the Prix Femina for her novel Lignes de Faille (Shelf Awareness, October 31, 2006), for the first time an American has won the Prix Goncourt, France's prestigious literary prize, the New York Times reported. The winner is Jonathan Littell, whose Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones),
the long fictional memoir of a former SS officer, was the talk of
the Frankfurt Book Fair last month. Rights for U.S. publication were since bought by
HarperCollins.
Littell grew up in France after his father, Robert Littell, a journalist and thriller writer, moved his family there. Les Bienveillantes has also won the Academie Francaise's annual fiction prize.
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The Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards, created in 1990 to honor "published
writers of African descent" and judged by "the national community of
black writers," were awarded over the weekend:
- Fiction: Nancy Rawles for My Jim, "a first-person account of Sadie, the wife of the runaway slave in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn."
- Nonfiction: historian John Hope Franklin for his autobiography, Mirror to America.
- Contemporary Fiction: Clyde W. Ford for The Long Mile. Ford is the creator of the Charlie Noble mystery series.
- Debut Fiction: Denise Nicholas, who starred in TV's Room 222 and In the Heat of the Night, for Freshwater Road.
The Washington Post has a long story on the award and this year's winners.
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Alan Zweibel has won the 2006 Thurber Prize for American Humor for his novel, The Other Shulman
(Random House). A five-time Emmy winner, Zweibel was an original writer
for Saturday Night Live, creator and producer of It's Garry Shandling's
Show and is a producer of Curb Your Enthusiasm. The Thurber
judges--P.J. O'Rourke, Henry Alford and Celia Rivenbark--described The Other Shulman
as "the hilarious story of an overweight, stressed-out, middle-aged man
who convinces himself that running the New York City marathon will
solve all his problems."
Runnersup were Kinky Friedman for Texas Hold 'Em: How I Was Born in a Manger, Died in the Saddle, and Came Back as a Horny Toad (St. Martin's) and Bill Scheft for Time Won't Let Me (HarperCollins).