Marilyn Nelson: Winner of the 2017 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature “Marilyn Nelson recognizes that, like gods and nature, words are awesome—impressive, daunting, inspiring great fear and great admiration—and for the rest of her life, up to the present,…
Alma Flor Ada is a Cuban American poet and author of both children’s and adult works in English and Spanish. Growing up among a family of storytellers in Camagüey, Cuba, she would earn her PhD from the Pontificia Universidad Católica…
“I know of no other writer who has been so adept at translating an experience of war and exile to the observation of the foibles and shortcomings of humankind, to leave the reader feeling, if occasionally somewhat despondent, nevertheless bemused…
“Meshack Asare is more than a son of Ghana; having retold tales from other African countries, such as Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa, he is a storyteller of the continent. His oeuvre has provided generations of children on the continent with…
Can Xue Can Xue (Deng Xiaohua), whose pseudonym in Chinese means both the dirty snow that refuses to melt and the purest snow at the top of a high mountain, was born in 1953 in Changsha City, Hunan Province, in…
Alison Anderson Alison Anderson is a literary translator and writer. Anderson grew up on the East Coast of the United States, then moved to Switzerland where she obtained her undergraduate degree in Russian and French and a master’s in translation…
“Some critics have called Mia Couto ‘the smuggler writer,’ a sort of Robin Hood of words who steals meanings to make them available in every tongue, forcing apparently separate worlds to communicate. Within his novels, each line is like a…
Benjamin Alire Sáenz Benjamin Alire Sáenz, USA. Selected work: Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood. Nominated by J. L. Powers. David Small David Small, USA. Selected work: The Gardener. Nominated by Kathryn Otoshi. Jamila Gavin Jamila Gavin, England and India. Selected work: Blackberry…
Kathleen T. Horning Kathleen T. Horning is director of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a graduate of UW-Madison and has worked her entire career at the CCBC, beginning…
“With her powerful vision and high-quality poetry, fiction, and young-adult literature, Ms. Nye may be one of the most complete and accomplished writers in the world.”—Roberto Con Davis Undiano, Executive Director of World Literature Today Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952)…
Lauren Camp Camp is a poet, artist and performer. She is the author of a book of poems, This Business of Wisdom, and more than 150 of her poems have been publshed in journals and anthologies. Her series of jazz…
César Aira is an Argentine writer, translator, and exponent of contemporary Argentine literature. He has published over seventy books of stories, novels, and essays. He is known for his prolific rate of publication, producing two to four novella-length books each…
“If you ever want to connect or reconnect with what it was like to view the world with a child’s sense of wonder, just read one of Virginia Euwer Wolff’s books.”—Nancy Barcelo Virginia Euwer Wolff (b. 1937) was born in Oregon.…
“For Williams, writing begins and ends with being immersed in the human condition, and out of the world springs the text, refined by craft and discipline.”—Daniel Simon, WLT March 2010 Vera B. Williams (b. 1927) was born in California, but moved to New…
“Katherine Paterson articulates important, difficult, and urgent truths, all within the safe haven of her books and within a world, both real and imagined, which she modestly presents in her own wise and at the same time collective voice both…
“Doyle’s great gift, I feel is that he charts for us one small corner of the world and, in doing so, reveals that it is no more out-of-the-way than anywhere else, really, once you give it a listen. He puts…
“As the first recipient of this landmark prize, Mildred D. Taylor will help remind the world of the importance — in fact, the urgency — of high quality children’s and young adult literature. She is a superb and deeply moving…
The Neustadt International Prize for Literature is a biennial award sponsored by the University of Oklahoma and World Literature Today. The Prize consists of $50,000, a replica of an eagle feather cast in silver, and a certificate. A generous endowment from…
“Mistry writes with great passion, and his body of work shows the most compassionate and astute observations of the human condition, making him one of the most exciting and important contemporary novelists writing in the English language.”—Samrat Upadhyay in his…
“Duo Duo remains a poet’s poet.”—Michelle Yeh, “‘Monologue of a Stormy Soul’: The Poetry and Poetics of Duo Duo, 1972-1988” (WLT Vol. 85, March 2011) Duo Duo 多多 (b. 1951) is the pen name of Li Shizheng. He started writing poetry in…
“Grace’s stories make a shining and enduring place formed of the brilliant weave of Maori oral storytelling and contained within the shape of contemporary Western forms. We are welcomed in, and when we get up to leave, we have been…
“A singular woman, Claribel Alegria was born for literature and has made literature a vital part of her life . . .”—Sergio Ramírez, “A Winged Tiger” (WLT Vol. 81, May 2007) Claribel Alegría (b. 1924) is often considered the most important contributor to…
“Zagajewski’s urging is the more compelling precisely because it is not heard, but overheard; we follow his example not because he demands it, but because his own struggle so fully engages our sympathies.”—Clare Cavanaugh, “Lyric and Public: The Case of…
“If one of the functions of great fiction is to teach us how to live, in his depictions of nature and his descriptions of Maqroll, Álvaro fulfills that duty, without precepts, certainly without dogma, but by sacralized, yet worldly, example.”—Edith…
“Malouf wants to retain and insist upon human moral responsibility, if not for what we endure, then certainly for how we make meaning of those events.”—Carolyn Bliss, “Reimagining the Remembered: David Malouf and the Moral Implications of Myth” (WLT Vol. 74,…
“It is through intertextuality that he extends his literary and philosophical referents to make postcolonial Somali culture part of a cosmopolitan discourse that is a crucial ingredient of what it means to be African in the modern world.”—Simon Gikandi, “Nuruddin…
“…we are lauding her here because she has given weeping its words and longing its lyrics.”—William Gass, “Encomium for Assia Djebar, 1996 Neustadt Laureate” (WLT Vol. 40, Autumn 1996) Assia Djebar (b. 1936) is the pen name of Fatima-Zohra Imalayen. She was…
“Kamau Brathwaite, a towering poet, has moved from the margins of language and history, from the peripheral realm of ”the other exiles,’ to the center of civilization, affecting a renaissance of oral poetry and remaking of the poetic world.” – H.…
“Cabral’s project is to re-create the world, taking the things—both abstract and concrete—that are common to all men and turning them around, making them uncommon, conferring on them the dimension they lacked.” —Richard Zenith, “The State of Things in the Poetry…
“He has been able to breathe life into the most uninspiring realities of modern existence and in this way has significantly broadened the scope of our poetic vision of the world.” – Jaan Kaplinski, from his 1990 nominating statement for Tranströmer…
“[Raja Rao is] perhaps the most brilliant—and certainly the most interesting—writer of modern India.”—Santha Rama Rau, as quoted in “The Quality of Presence” (WLT Vol. 62, Autumn 1988) Raja Rao (1908-2006) was born in Hassan, in what is now Narnataka in South…
“For a spirit as genuinely cosmopolitan as Max Frisch, one could not imagine an award more appropriate than the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.”—Francis Michael Sharp, “Max Frisch: A Writer in a Technological Age” (WLT Vol. 60, Autumn 1986) Max Frisch (1911-1991)…
“He seems not only to see but also to say, sometimes tortuously but at the same time quite clearly and incorruptibly, how things are. The world speaks ‘indistinctly, fast and about everything all at once,’ and Haavikko’s solution has been…
“Octavio Paz is the critical, free, lucid conscience of the world in which we live.” —Jorge Guillén, “In Homage to Octavio Paz, Neustadt Laureate” (WLT Vol. 56, Autumn 1982) Octavio Paz (1914-1988) was born and raised in Mixcoac, a present-day part of Mexico City.…
“To my mind Josef Škvorecký is one of the finest living writers. His two short novels The Bass Saxophone and The Legend of Emöke I put in the same rank as James Joyce’s The Dead and the very best of Henry James’s shorter novels.”—Graham Green (WLT Vol. 54,…
“The example of Czesław Miłosz inspires hope. He did that which is now imperative for people leaving the countries of Eastern Europe to do: he preserved his spiritual integrity and made his way back to the motherland.”—Tomas Venclova, “Czesław Miłosz:…
“More can be learned about how to write poetry from Elizabeth Bishop than from reading the writings of most other poets.”—Jerome Mazzaro, “Elizabeth Bishop’s Particulars” (WLT Vol. 51, Winter 1977) Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was born in Massachussetts. Her father died when she…
“Verbal humor is one of the more obvious features of Ponge’s style. It runs the whole gamut of word play, down to the outrageous sort of pun customarily greeted with a groan. In part, this carries on the systematic surrealist…
“Nobody who still knows that books can be fun should miss this novel [Cien años] and the other works of Gabriel García Márquez.”—Wolfgang A. Luchting, “Gabriel García Márquez: The Boom and the Whisper” (Books Abroad Vol. 44, Winter 1970) Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1927) was…
“Thanks to Giuseppe Ungaretti and his work, Italian poetry early in this century regained a universality of language through which have found exemplary expression the innermost anguish, dreams, and hopes of modern man.”—Luciano Rebay, “Encomium for Giuseppe Ungaretti” (Books Abroad Vol.…
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