World Literature Today announced that Edwidge Danticat won the $50,000 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, which "recognizes outstanding literary merit in literature worldwide." Robert Con Davis-Undiano, the magazine's executive director, called Danticat a "master writer whose newest work promises even greater heights."
Achy Obejas nominated Danticat and was one of eight jurors for the prize. In her nominating statement, Obejas said Danticat's work "addresses how the specter of history haunts the unresolved present" and undermines the future unless people find a way to redeem it.
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The shortlist for the 2018 PNBA Book Awards, selected by a committee of Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association bookseller members, consists of:
All's Faire in Middle School by Victoria Jamieson (Dial Books for Young Readers)
American War: A Novel by Omar El Akkad (Knopf)
The Book of Mistakes by Corinna Luyken (Dial Books for Young Readers)
Dead Feminists: Historic Heroines in Living Color by Chandler O'Leary and Jessica Spring (Sasquatch Books)
The Hope of Another Spring: Takuichi Fujii, Artist and Wartime Witness by Barbara Johns (University of Washington Press)
Idaho: A Novel by Emily Ruskovich (Random House)
Little Blue Chair illustrated by Madeline Kloepper (Tundra Books)
The Selected Short Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin: The Found and the Lost; The Unreal and the Real by Ursula K. Le Guin (Saga Press/S&S)
Speed of Life by J.M. Kelly (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books for Young Readers)
This Is How It Always Is: A Novel by Laurie Frankel (Flatiron)
Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean by Jonathan White (Trinity University Press)
You Don't Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir by Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown)
PNBA will announce the six winners of the 2017 Pacific Northwest Book Awards in early January.