Bruce Bond is the winner of the 2021 Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature for his poetry collection Liberation of Dissonance, which Schaffner Press will publish in spring 2022. The award honors Nicholas Schaffner, a poet, musician, biographer, and music critic, and brother of Schaffner Press publisher Timothy Schaffner.
Schaffner said about the winner: "With its finely honed language and interweaving of free-verse couplets, poet and musician Bruce Bond has returned us to the world of structure and form as the framework for this profound exploration of dissonance in music, in art, in our lives and its underlying power to restore meaning and hope in a chaotic world."
Bond is a poet and musician, and the Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas. With Corey Marks, he is the poetry editor for American Literary Review. His previous collections include Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems, Gold Bee, and Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods.
Prize runners-up were: Matteo Urella for Machetes Dipped in Rum: The Oral History of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and Elizabeth Sweeney for Ghosts of our Former Selves: A Novel in Stories.
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Irish author Edna O'Brien will receive France's highest cultural distinction by being named commander of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, which is given to people who have "distinguished themselves by their creations in the artistic or literary field."
The Guardian reported that from her debut novel The Country Girls, which "was banned when first published in 1960, to her most recent novel, Girl, which tells the story of Nigeria's abducted Chibok schoolgirls, the French Embassy in Ireland described O'Brien as 'a committed feminist who offered a voice to women around the world' and is 'one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.' "
O'Brien "has built a special relationship with France and the French public both for the quality of her writing but also for her universal struggles, which received a particular resonance in France," said the French Embassy. She was also the first non-French recipient of the Prix Femina special in 2019, honoring her entire body of work.