Saturday, October 25, 2014

Lily King, Roz Chast and Kate Samworth Win Kirkus Prizes

By  - October 23, 2014 7- The New York Times

The literary journal Kirkus Reviews announced on Thursday the winners of its first annual book prizes. The three winners each received a $50,000 award.
Photo
From Roz Chast's "Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?"Credit
The New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast won in the nonfiction category for “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?,” a chronicle of coping with her aging parents. In her review in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote that in this work about her parents, Ms. Chast achieved “a new depth and amplitude of emotion.”

“Her account of growing up with them in Brooklyn as an only child,” she continued, “and her efforts, decades later, to help them navigate the jagged shoals of old age and ill health, is by turns grim and absurd, deeply poignant and laugh-out-loud funny.”

Lily King earned the fiction prize for her novel “Euphoria,” inspired by the life of the anthropologist Margaret Mead. In The New York Times Book Review, Emily Eakin said the book was “as uncanny as it is transporting,” adding that it was “a meticulously researched homage to Mead’s restless mind and a considered portrait of Western anthropology in its primitivist heyday.’
“It’s also a taut, witty, fiercely intelligent tale of competing egos and desires in a landscape of exotic menace — a love triangle in extremis,” she added.

Kate Samworth took home the young readers’ literature prize for “Aviary Wonders Inc.” The judges praised the book for “confronting environmental issues in a clever and whimsical way.”
The winners were announced at a ceremony in Austin, Tex., where the Texas Book Festival is scheduled to take place Saturday and Sunday.

No comments: