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Jurors for the 2008 Neustadt Prize
Chris Abani | Sinan Antoon | Rilla Askew | Marcel Bénabou | Peter Constantine | Joy Harjo | Huang Xiang | Christine Montalbetti | Bharati Mukherjee | Yoko Tawada
Chris Abani’s prose includes the novels The Virgin of Flames (Penguin, 2007), GraceLand (FSG, 2004/Picador 2005), Masters of the Board (Delta, 1985), and the novellas Becoming Abigail (Akashic, 2006) and Song for Night (Akashic, 2007). His poetry collections are Hands Washing Water (Copper Canyon, 2006), Dog Woman (Red Hen, 2004), Daphne’s Lot (Red Hen, 2003), and Kalakuta Republic (Saqi, 2001). He is a professor at the University of California, Riverside, and the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the PEN Hemingway Book Prize. (Source: www.chrisabani.com)
Sinan Antoon is an Iraqi-born poet, novelist, and translator. He has given poetry readings in Baghdad, Beirut, Berlin, London, New York, and Seville. These poems first appeared in his new collection of poems in English, The Baghdad Blues (Harbor Mountain Press), and a translation of his novel I`jam: An Iraqi Rhapsody was also published earlier this year (City Lights Books). His poetry was anthologized in Iraqi Poetry Today, and he has also contributed numerous translations of Arabic poetry into English. Antoon returned to his native Baghdad in 2003 as a member of InCounter Productions to co-direct/produce a documentary, About Baghdad, about the lives of Iraqis in a post-Saddam occupied Iraq. He is a senior editor with the Arab Studies Journal, a member of PEN America, a contributing editor to Banipal, and a member of the editorial committee of Middle East Report. Antoon is currently an assistant professor of contemporary Arab culture and politics at New York University’s Gallatin School.
Rilla Askew’s first novel, The Mercy Seat, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dublin IMPAC Prize, and received the Oklahoma Book Award and the Western Heritage Award in 1998. Her second novel, Fire in Beulah, received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and the Myers Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. Her recent novel, Harpsong, is published by the University of Oklahoma Press. She received an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College in 1989, and has taught in graduate writing programs at Syracuse University, Brooklyn College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Askew’s short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in anthologies and literary magazines, and her story “The Killing Blanet” was selected for Prize Stories 1993: The O. Henry Awards. She received a Writing Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbertide, Italy, in 2004. Askew is married to actor Paul Austin, and they divide their time between Oklahoma, where she teaches spring semesters at the University of Oklahoma, and their home in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York.
Marcel Bénabou was born into an old Sephardic family in Meknès (Morocco) in 1939. In 1956 he decided to leave Morocco and went to Paris, where he studied classics, first at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand (1956-1960), then at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (1960-1964). In 1965, he was admitted as a researcch fellow at the CNRS (the French National Center for Scientific Research), and specialized in Roman history. He earned his doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1972, and shortly after, he was appointed as a Professor of Ancient history at the University of Paris VII–Denis Diderot. He is now emeritus. The most important of his historical works is La Résistance africaine à la romanisation (The African Resistance to Romanization), first published in 1976 (2nd ed. 2005).
Besides his academic career, Bénabou is a writer whose first writings were made in collaboration with his close friend Georges Perec. In 1969, two years after Perec, he joined the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle = Workshop for Potential Literature), a group of mathematicians and writers founded by Raymond Queneau.The group, which has included Marcel Duchamp and Italo Calvino, is devoted to the study of literary forms and structures. Marcel Bénabou has served as Oulipo’s « Definitively Provisional Secretary » since 1970. As an Oulipian, he is the author of numerous works and exercises. But his main books are centrally about . . . books: he likes to reflect with humor on the elusive nature of writing and reading.
Peter Constantine’s most recent translations are The Essential Writings of Machiavelli (Modern Library, 2007) and The Bird Is a Raven by Benjamin Lebert (Knopf, 2006), which was awarded the Helen und Kurt Wolff Translation Prize. He was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann, and the National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov: Thirty-Eight New Stories. His translation of the complete works of Isaac Babel received the Koret Jewish Literature Award and a National Jewish Book Award citation. He has recently translated Within Four Walls: The Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, 1936-1968 for Harcourt, and Gogol’s Taras Bulba, Tolstoy’s The Cossacks, and Voltaire’s Candide for Modern Library.
Constantine was one of the editors for A Century of Greek Poetry, 1900-2000 and is currently co-editing an anthology of Greek poetry since Homer for W.W. Norton. He is also a senior editor of Conjunctions. His translation of Stylianos Harkianakis’ poetry collection, Mother, received the Hellenic Association of Translators of Literature Prize, and his upcoming translation of Sophocles’ Theban Trilogy will be published by Barnes and Noble later this year.
Joy Harjo is a multitalented artist of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. She is an internationally known poet, performer, writer and musician. She has published seven books of acclaimed poetry. They include She Had Some Horses, In Mad Love and War, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and her most recent How We Became Human, New and Selected Poems from W.W. Norton. Her poetry awards include the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award, Oklahoma Book Awards, 200; the American Indian Festival of Words Author Award from the Tulsa City County Library; the 2000 Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award; the 1998 Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award; the 1997 New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts; the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas; and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She co-edited an anthology of contemporary Native women’s writing: Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Native Women’s Writing of North America. It was pronounced one of the London Observer’s Best Books of 1997; and wrote the award-winning children’s book from Harcourt, The Good Luck Cat. She also contributed poetic prose to photographs by Stephen Strom in Secrets from the Center of the World. Forthcoming is a book of stories from W.W. Norton.
Harjo’s first music CD, Letter from the End of the 20th Century was released by Silver Wave Records in 1997. Harjo co-produced the album and is featured as poet and saxophone player. The album was honored by the First Americans in the Arts for Outstanding Musical Achievement and called by Pulse Magazine the “best dub poetry album recorded in North America.” Her recently released second CD or original songs, Native Joy for Real, crosses over many genres and has been praised for its daring brilliance. Harjo has performed internationally, from the Arctic Circle in Norway at the Riddu Riddu Festival, to Madras, India, to the Ford Theater in Los Angeles. She has been featured on Bill Moyers’s The Power of the Word series, and will be featured this spring on a new Garrison Keillor show. Harjo was also the narrator for the Turner The Native Americans series and the narrator for the Emmy award-winning show Navajo Codetalkers for National Geographic.
Harjo’s other accomplishments include co-producer and talent of the music video “Eagle Song,” nominated for best music video at the American Indian Film Festival 2002. The American Indian Film Festival awarded her the Eagle Spirit Achievement Award that year. She has served on the National Council on the Arts. She is the Joseph Russo endowed professor at University of New Mexico, and when not teaching and performing lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, where she is a member of the Hui Nalu Canoe Club. (Source: www.joyharjo.com)
Huang Xiang was born in Hunan Province, China, in 1941. Huang began writing poems in the 1950s and has been imprisoned repeatedly for his work. In 1978 he founded “Enlightenment,” the first underground writers’ society, and started a literary magazine with the same title. In exile in the United States since 1997, he is currently resident poet in Pittsburgh under the PEN Cities of Asylum program for writers. Huang has published poems and essays, and his Out of Communist China, a bilingual selection, was published in 2003. (Source: www.pen.org)
Christine Montalbetti was born in Le Havre in 1965 and lives in Paris. She mainly writes novels and fictional narratives. In her novel Sa fable achevée, Simon sort dans la bruine (2001), a man meets a friend he hadn't seen for a long time and thinks about the connections between friendship and time. Her novel L'Origine de l'homme (2002) freely evokes two seasons in the life of a paleontologist from the nineteenth century who is doing his best to be the hero of the novel. Her novel Western (2005) plays with the conventions of the American genre of the western. Expérience de la campagne (2005) is a short narrative in which a man thinks at night about his relationship to the countryside. Nouvelles sur le sentiment amoureux (2007) is a collection of short stories dealing with the origins of love and the complexity of the emotions it gives rise to. In addition to her fictional narratives, Montalbetti is also interested in the theater. Some of her short stories will be adapted for the stage at the Avignon festival in July 2007, and she just wrote a play, Le Cas Jekyll, inspired by Stevenson, which will be performed in Amiens by the French actor Denis Podalydès. A professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII, Montalbetti has also authored a variety of scholarly books that have served to establish her reputation as a distinguished literary critic and theorist.
Bharati Mukherjee is the author of seven novels (most recently Desirable Daughters and The Tree Bride), two collections of short stories (Darkness and The Middleman & Other Stories), and the co-author, with Clark Blaise, of two books of non-fiction (Days and Nights in Calcutta and The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy), and numerous essays on immigration and American culture. She is the first naturalized U.S. citizen to have won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Best Fiction. She is a Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and in German, and has published many books—stories, novels, poems, plays, essays—in both languages. She has received numerous awards for her writing, including the Akutagawa Prize (Japan), the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize (a German award recognizing foreign writers for their contributions to German culture), the Itoh Sei Prize (Japan), the Tanizaki Junichiro Prize (Japan), and the Goethe Medal (an official decoration of the Federal Republic of Germany awarded by the Goethe-Institut). She has given about 600 readings in Europe, Canada, the U.S., and East Asia. Translations into English: The Bridegroom Was a Dog (Kodansha International), Where Europe Begins (New Directions), Facing the Bridge (New Directions); translations into French: Narrateurs sans âmes, Opium pour Ovid, Train de nuit avec suspects, and L’œil nu (Editions Verdier). Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been featured in journals and anthologies also in Korea, China, Italy, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Finnland, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Russia. In 1999 she was the Max Kade Distinguished Visitor and writer-in-residence at the Foreign Languages and Literatures Section at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in 2004 the writer-in-residence at the Deutsches Haus, New York.
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