Kirkus Prize

Let's go ahead and end, uh, our news segment on a good note.

And in this particular case, we are celebrating an individual, uh, Tayari Jones, and she won, uh, the Kirkus Prize for fiction, uh, which is a $50,000 prize, for her new novel, Ken.

Uh, Ken, uh, uh, like I said, it's fiction.

It follows two Black women, uh, Annie and Ni- and Nicey, uh, two motherless friends growing up in Louisiana and Atlanta across the middle of the 20th century.

Like, honestly, I don't know.

My friend Pam Koloff, who just won the Kirkus Prize for her amazing book Catch the Devil, which somebody called Catch the D to me the other day, and I couldn't stop laughing.

Do you know what Catch the D means? I think

I know

The NBA is not the only award to report.

The twenty twenty-six Kirkus Prize winners have also recently been announced.

The Kirkus Prize exists to highlight more than ninety-three years of thoughtful criticism Kirkus Reviews has contributed to the world of books.

The winner of the Kirkus Prize in young people's literature is a recent release, Anger Is Only a Shadow by Elizabeth Acevedo, which released on September fifteenth.

The Kirkus Prize only has three categories: fiction, nonfiction, and young readers literature, compared to five from the National Book Award, which includes categories for poetry and translated literature.

The winners for the Kirkus Prize receive $50,000 for the authors in each category.

With awards happening over the coming weeks, it is a reminder that we are nearly done with the year.

For students, that means a break from school, and for readers, that means we will be seeing a slowdown of releases.

I don't understand that whatsoever 'cause w- we're the, we, this barely made it into our agenda.

We like the Kirkus Prizes.

Mm-hmm.

And more than that, Kin by Tera Jones, who I really like, another book I haven't got to yet, is in my fantasy league draft, so I'm counting it here 'cause I need some points 'cause I lost the Disappears, the National Book Award.

Um, tells a story of how her parents, who immigrated here in the '80s, opened their Chinese restaurant, and Julie used to help her father navigate the night with a map in the car when she was a kid in elementary school.

The Kirkus Prize is a huge literary award that's been around for over a decade.

Julie was nominated.

She didn't win, but she was nominated, which was so exciting.

Nobel Prizes Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature today for what the Swedish Academy characterized as her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.

Literary Awards Tayari Jones's novel Kin, which follows two lifelong friends growing up in Louisiana, won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction yesterday.

Pamela Koloff's Catch the Devil, an investigation of a 1987 murder conviction on the Gulf Coast, won the award for non-fiction.

R.I.P. Computer scientist Margaret Hamilton, who led the team that wrote the onboard software for NASA's Apollo missions in the 1960s, died last week at the age of 90.

October 6th is the National Book Award finalist list, which that's the big book award here in the United States.

October 7th is the Kirkus Prize, which we were just looking up before the episode started, and we learned had a $50,000 prize, and only-

Wow

... books that have a starred review on Kirkus are eligible.

The premise itself reminds me a lot of R.F. Kuang's Yellow Face in terms of whose stories get to be told and when do they get to be told.

The novel was already a finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, and I suspect it's going to be the kind of book where two people can finish the exact same pages and come away furious with completely different characters.

Those are often the most enjoyable books to discuss at book club.

[laughs] Luna Phoenix Queen is out October 13th.

His first novel, Souter, was published in 1983, and James is his latest novel, published just earlier this year, and this year being 2024.

And the book has already won the Kirkus Prize and just very recently won the National Book Award for Fiction.

It is also a finalist for the Booker Prize.

And all, I think, really well deserved awards.