Prizes

Yesterday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences produced yet another all-male slate for the Best Director category of the Oscars-and provoked yet another round of outrage that America's culture industry is incapable of recognizing the achievements of women. But there is, in fact, a major creative industry in which women are routinely awarded the top honors.  Read more

As the deadline looms, we ask former winner Jane Davis what success in our awards for self-publishing meant to them  Read more

With the hindsight of history, the Booker misses plenty of tricks. In 1986, The Handmaid’s Tale, one of the most vital and prescient works of modern fiction, was pipped to the prize by Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils. With Margaret Atwood now elevated to the status of a contemporary prophet, 2019 may have seemed like an opportunity to redress that mistake.  Read more

Twenty years before Peter Handke would become a Nobel laureate, he won another title. In 1999, Salman Rushdie named him the runner-up for "International moron of the year" in the Guardian, for his "series of impassioned apologias for the genocidal regime of Slobodan Milošević". (The winner was actor Charlton Heston, for being a gun lobbyist.)  Read more

In an accelerated age, the best response is to take your time. There is no choice with Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann's 1,000-page plus novel, shortlisted on Tuesday for the 2019 Booker prize. A bewildering feat of simultaneous compression and expansion, it takes us into the mind of an Ohio housewife as her thoughts run wild - from the state of the nation to the minutiae of daily life.  Read more