Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections, a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.
The Prix Femina is a French literary prize created in 1904 by 22 writers for the magazine La Vie heureuse. The prize is decided each year by an exclusively female jury. They reward French-language works written in prose or verse, by both women and men. The winner is announced on the first Wednesday of November each year.
Oprah's Book Club was a book discussion club segment of the American talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, highlighting books chosen by host Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey started the book club in 1996, selecting a new book, usually a novel, for viewers to read and discuss each month. In total, the club recommended 70 books during its 15 years.
Elif Shafak is a Turkish-British novelist, essayist, public speaker, political scientist and activist.
The Road is a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. The book details the grueling journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed industrial civilization and almost all life. The novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006. The book was adapted into a film of the same name in 2009, directed by John Hillcoat.
Sinan Antoon, is an Iraqi poet, novelist, scholar, and literary translator. He has been described as "one of the most acclaimed authors of the Arab world." Alberto Manguel, described him as "one of the great fiction writers of our time.” He is an associate professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.
Uwem Akpanlisten is a Nigerian writer. He is the author of Say You're One of Them (2008), a collection of five stories published by Little, Brown & Company. The book inspired Angelique Kidjo to write the song "Agbalagba". It made the Best of the Year list at People magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and other places. The New York Times made it the Editor's Choice, and Entertainment Weekly listed it at #27 in their Best of the Decade. Say You're One of Them won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Open Book Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. A New York Times and Wall Street Journal #1 bestseller, it has been translated into 12 languages. It won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and was picked by the Oprah Winfrey Book Club September 17, 2009, in Central Park. Two months later, Oprah interviewed Uwem in Chicago as part of her bookclub event with Anderson Cooper giving short commentaries on some of the African countries in Uwem's book. The interview was streamed live simultaneously from Oprah.com, Facebook and CNN.
Oprah Gail Winfrey is an American talk show host, television producer, actress, author, and media proprietor. She is best known for her talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, broadcast from Chicago, which ran in national syndication for 25 years, from 1986 to 2011. Dubbed the "Queen of All Media", she was the richest African-American of the 20th century and was once the world's only black billionaire. By 2007, she was often ranked as the most influential woman in the world.
Laird Hunt is a Singapore-born American writer, translator, and academic.
Oprah's Book Club 2.0 is a book club founded June 1, 2012, by Oprah Winfrey in a joint project between OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network and O: The Oprah Magazine. The club is a re-launch of the original Oprah's Book Club, which ran for 15 years and ended in 2011, but as the "2.0" name suggests, digital media is the new focus. It incorporates the use of various social media platforms and e-readers that allow for the quoting and uploading of passages and notes for discussion, among other features.
Donal Ryan is an Irish writer. He has published six novels and one short story collection. In 2016, novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry described Ryan in The Guardian newspaper as "the king of the new wave of Irish writers". All of his novels have been number one bestsellers in Ireland.
The Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence is an annual national literary award designed to recognize rising African-American fiction writers. First awarded in 2007, the prize is underwritten by donors of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation in honor of the literary heritage provided by author Ernest J. Gaines, with the winner receiving a cash award "to support and enable the writer to focus on writing." It has been described as "the nation's biggest prize for African-American writers".
The Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine is a French literary award given each year to an American novel translated into French and published in that year. The first award was in 2015. The award was created by the bookseller and publisher Francis Geffard. The jury consists of nine members: three literary critics, three publishers, and three booksellers.
The Overstory is a novel by Richard Powers published in 2018 by W. W. Norton & Company. It is Powers' twelfth novel. The book is about nine Americans whose unique life experiences with trees bring them together to address the destruction of forests. Powers was inspired to write the work while teaching at Stanford University, after he encountered giant redwood trees for the first time.
Trent Dalton is an Australian journalist and literary fiction author.
Nightcrawling is a 2022 novel by Leila Mottley. Along with other honors, the novel was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, making Mottley the youngest author to have been nominated for the award.
Hamnet is a 2020 novel by Maggie O'Farrell. It is a fictional account of William Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, who died at age eleven in 1596.
Second Place is a 2021 novel by Rachel Cusk.
Bewilderment is a 2021 novel by Richard Powers, published on September 21, 2021, by W. W. Norton & Company. It is Powers' thirteenth novel, his first since winning the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Overstory (2018).
Cloud Cuckoo Land is a 2021 historical and speculative fiction novel by Pulitzer-prize winning author Anthony Doerr. It was first published on September 28, 2021, in the United States by Charles Scribner's Sons and the United Kingdom by Fourth Estate. The novel centers around an Ancient Greek codex that links characters from fifteenth-century Constantinople, present-day Idaho, and a twenty-second-century starship.
