Doris Lessing, UK author of The Golden Notebook, wins the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature. Read an interview with Lessing by NBCC President John Freeman on Critical Mass.
– The CBC Literary Awards deadline is November 1. This literary competition is the sole celebrator of original, unpublished works in Canada’s two official languages. There are three categories—short story, poetry, and creative nonfiction—and $60,000 of prize money courtesy of the Canada Council for the Arts. In addition, winning entries are published in Air Canada’s enRoute magazine and visibility is offered to the winners and their winning entries by CBC.
– National Book Awards Shortlist
- Fiction
- Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork (FSG)
- Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance (FSG)
- Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown)
- Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (FSG)
- Jim Shepard, Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Knopf)
- Nonfiction
- Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Knopf)
- Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great (Twelve)
- Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (Hill and Wang/FSG)
- Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Knopf)
- Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday)
- Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Knopf)
- Poetry
- Linda Gregerson, Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin)
- Robert Hass, Time and Materials (Ecco/HarperCollins)
- David Kirby, The House on Boulevard St. (Louisiana State University Press)
- Stanley Plumly, Old Heart (W.W. Norton)
- Ellen Bryant Voigt, Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (Norton)
- Young People’s Literature
- Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown)
- Kathleen Duey, Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One (Atheneum)
- M. Sindy Felin, Touching Snow (Atheneum)
- Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic)
- Sara Zarr, Story of a Girl (Little, Brown)
- Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown)
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