Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of nonfiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children's books, two graphic novels, and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television.
Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead is an American novelist. He is the author of nine novels, including his 1999 debut The Intuitionist; The Underground Railroad (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and The Nickel Boys, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020, making him one of only four writers ever to win the prize twice. He has also published two books of nonfiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Sujata Massey is an American mystery author and historical fiction novelist. Her books are published in English in the US and Canada, the United Kingdom and India, and Australia/New Zealand. Massey’s novels are also available in different languages and formats in Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain and Thailand.
The Kiriyama Prize was an international literary award awarded to books about the Pacific Rim and South Asia. Its goal was to encourage greater understanding among the peoples and nations of the region. Established in 1996, the prize was last awarded in 2008.
Yasnaya Polyana is a writer's house museum, the former home of the writer Leo Tolstoy. It is 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) southwest of Tula, Russia, and 200 kilometres (120 mi) from Moscow.
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time. He received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 and for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902, and 1909.
My Year of Meats is the 1998 debut novel by Ruth Ozeki. The book takes advantage of the differences between Japanese and American culture to comment on both.
Leone Ross FRSL is a British novelist, short story writer, editor, journalist and academic, who is of Jamaican and Scottish ancestry.
Anees Salim is an Indian author known for his books like Vanity Bagh, The Blind Lady's Descendants and the Small Town Sea. He is from the town of Varkala, and now lives in Kochi, Kerala. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Blind Lady's Descendants in 2018, becoming only the fourth Malayalee in history to win the award for an English work. Some of his columns have appeared in newspaper The Indian Express.
The 2013 Booker Prize for Fiction was awarded on 15 October 2013 to Eleanor Catton for her novel The Luminaries. A longlist of thirteen titles was announced on 23 July, and these were narrowed down to a shortlist of six titles, announced on 10 September. The jury was chaired by Robert Macfarlane, who was joined by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Natalie Haynes, Martha Kearney, and Stuart Kelly. The shortlist contained great geographical and ethnic diversity, with Zimbabwean-born NoViolet Bulawayo, Eleanor Catton of New Zealand, Jim Crace from England, Indian American Jhumpa Lahiri, Canadian-American Ruth Ozeki and Colm Tóibín of Ireland.
All Over Creation is a novel by Ruth Ozeki about Yumi Fuller, the Japanese-American daughter of a potato farmer in Idaho who returns home as an adult to care for her parents, Lloyd and Momoko, and stumbles into the growing controversy around genetically modified food (GMOs). The book was first published in 2003 by Viking Press and reprinted by Penguin in 2004.
A Tale for the Time Being is a metafictional novel by Ruth Ozeki narrated by two characters, a sixteen-year-old Japanese American girl living in Tokyo who keeps a diary, and a Japanese American writer living on an island off the coast of British Columbia who finds the diary of the young woman washed ashore some time after the 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan.
The Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award is an annual all-Russian literary award that was founded in 2003 by the Leo Tolstoy Museum Estate and Samsung Electronics. The award is presented for the best traditional-style novel written in Russian or translated into Russian.
Cow Country (2015) is a novel written under the pseudonym Adrian Jones Pearson and published by Cow Eye Press. It centers on the fortunes of a down-on-his-luck educational administrator at the fictional Cow Eye Community College.
Guzel Shamilyevna Yakhina is a Russian author and screenwriter. She is a winner of the Big Book literary prize and the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award.
Narine Abgaryan (Armenian: Նարինե Յուրիի Աբգարյան is a Russian writer and blogger of Armenian origin. In 2011, Abgaryan was a nominee of Big Book and Laureate of Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award, Russia, in 2016.
Oleg Yermakov is a Russian writer. He was born in Smolensk in 1961, and worked in a forest reserve near Lake Baikal before doing his military service during the war in Afghanistan. His experiences formed the basis of an acclaimed collection of short stories, titled Afghan Stories (1991). He followed up with a novel, The Mark of the Beast (1994) which was nominated for the Russian Booker Prize. His war writing has been compared to that of Tolstoy and the literature of the Vietnam War.
The Book of Form and Emptiness is a novel by American author Ruth Ozeki, published in 2021 by Viking. Ozeki's fourth novel, the book won the 2022 Women's Prize for Fiction. The story follows a boy who hears voices from inanimate objects while the narrative explores themes of mental illness and bereavement.
