BTW News Briefs

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Here’s what’s happening this week in the book industry:

BookExpo and the New York Rights Fair (NYRF) have announced the signing of a multiyear agreement to manage the Fair as a joint partnership. The two entities are currently administering surveys to this year’s participants; the results will help decide the structure and location of the 2019 Fair.

Anthony Bourdain died in Strasbourg, France, reportedly by suicide. Bourdain was the host of the Travel Channel’s No Reservations and, most recently, CNN’s Parts Unknown; the author of cooking memoirs Kitchen Confidential (Bloomsbury USA, 2000) and Medium Raw (Ecco, 2010); and penned cookbooks including Appetites (Ecco, 2016). In 2011, Bourdain launched the Anthony Bourdain Books imprint at Ecco.

The Authors Guild has announced it will launch 14 regional chapters in major cities and metropolitan areas to host a variety of programs serving the local writing community. The guild has also instituted new procedures to help its members resolve complaints with their book listings on Amazon.

Former NCIBA executive director Hut Landon published a June 7 opinion piece on Berkeleyside.com criticizing Amazon’s plan to open a bricks-and-mortar bookstore in Berkeley, California. In “What Will Amazon Books Mean for Berkeley’s Fourth Street?” Landon warns local consumers that the imminent opening will result in financial suffering for the area’s smaller independent retailers.

Lesley Nneka Arimah received the New York Public Library’s 2018 Young Lions Fiction Award for What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky: Stories (Riverhead Books) at a ceremony on June 7. The award is given annually to an American writer age 35 or younger, selected from five finalists, for either a novel or a collection of short stories.

We Should All Be Feminists author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the winner of the 2018 PEN Pinter Prize. At the awards ceremony in Britain on October 9, Adichie will also announce the 2018 International Writer of Courage, selected from a shortlist of international cases supported by English PEN.

Debths by Susan Howe (New Directions) and This Wound Is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt (Frontenac House) are the International and Canadian winners of the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize, respectively. The prize is for first edition books of poetry written in or translated into English, submitted from any country.

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (Riverhead Books) has won the U.K.’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. The novel about an immigrant family was also an August 2017 Indie Next List pick.


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