Book Award Round Up: Part 1: Latino, Arab and Australian!
You have probably heard the buzziest book award news in the last week as Margaret Atwood and Bernadine Evaristo shared the Man Booker prize for only the 3rd time in the history of the UK’s most prestigious book award. This was fun news and I know that I personally loved seeing two female authors, including an author of color, get such a prestigious honor.
However, book awards over the last few months have also highlighted the achievements of many more authors from around the world and I am excited to share them all with you – these awards are such a great way to be introduced to the best work coming out of regions and populations who may not get the kind of publicity and exposure that puts their work on the radars of prestigious award judging panels such as the Man Booker Prize.
Today, I want to share with you three awards that highlight work coming out of specific geographical regions or written by people from these regions. Later this week, I will be highlighting come female-centered awards that aim to support and expose the work of talented, upcoming female authors.
The Arab American Book Awards is a literary program created to honor books written by and about Arab Americans. The program generates greater awareness of Arab American scholarship and writing through an annual award competition and educational outreach. Books must be written, edited or illustrated by an Arab American, or address the Arab American experience and portray or represent Arab Americans in accurate and engaging ways while avoid stereotypes and reflecting rich characterization.
Fiction Winners: Amreekiya by Lena Mahmoud and As Good As True by Cheryl Reid
Amreekiya: Isra Shadi, a twenty-one-year-old woman of mixed Palestinian and white descent, lives in California with her paternal amu (uncle), amtu (aunt) and cousins after the death of her mother and abandonment by her father at a young age. Ever the outcast in her amu and amtu’s household, they eagerly encourage Isra to marry and leave. After rejecting a string of undesirable suitors, she marries Yusef, an old love from her past. An exploration of womanhood from an underrepresented voice in American literature, Amreekiya is simultaneously unique and relatable. Featuring an authentic array of characters, Mahmoud’s first novel is a much-needed story in a divided world.
As Good As True: After a night of rage and terror, Anna Nassad wakes to find her abusive husband dead and instinctively hides her bruises and her relief. As the daughter of Syrian immigrants living in segregated Alabama in the 1950s, Anna has never belonged, and now her world is about to erupt. As threats and suspicions arise in the angry community, Anna must confront her secrets in the face of devastating turmoil and reconcile her anguished relationship with her daughter. Will she discover the strength to fight for those she loves most, even if it means losing all she’s ever known?
Non Fiction Winners: Syrian and Lebanese Patricios in Sao Paulo by Oswaldo Truzzi; translated by Ramon J. Stern and The Sound of Listening by Philip Metres
Syrian and Lebanese Patricios in Sao Paulo: Syrian and Lebanese immigrants to Brazil chose to settle in urban areas, a marked contrast to many other migrant groups. In São Paulo, these newcomers embraced new lives as merchants, shopkeepers and industrialists, making them a dominant force in the city’s business sector. Oswaldo Truzzi’s pioneering book identifies the complex social paths blazed by Syrian and Lebanese immigrants and their descendants from the 1890s to the 1960s. He considers their relationships to other groups within São Paulo’s kaleidoscopic mix of cultures. He also reveals the differences–real and perceived–between Syrians and Lebanese in terms of religious and ethnic affinities and in the economic sphere. Finally, he compares the two groups with their counterparts in the United States and looks at the wave of Lebanese Muslims to São Paulo that began in the 1960s.
The Sound of Listening: Gathering a decade of his writing on poetry, Philip Metres widens our sense of poetry as a way of being in the world, proposing that poems can offer a permeability to marginalized voices and a shelter from the imperial noise and despair that can silence us. The Sound of Listening ranges between expansive surveys of the poetry of 9/11, Arab American poetry, documentary poetry, landscape poetry, installation poetry and peace poetry; personal explorations of poets such as Adrienne Rich, Khalil Gibran, Lev Rubinstein and Arseny Tarkovsky; and intimate dialogues with Randa Jarrar, Fady Joudah and Micah Cavaleri, that illuminate Metres’ practice of listening in his 2015 work, Sand Opera.
Poetry Winner: Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance by Fady Joudah
“Fady Joudah has been writing essential poetry for some time, but few books of American poetry seem to me as essential as this one: it is forging a lyric that works at the crosscurrents of reportage, myth and dream where falsely imagined boundaries―of gender, nation, family―fray and unfold, and there are possibilities other than ‘to go mad among the mad / or to go it alone.’ Joudah’s gifts for articulating the intersections of bewilderment, tenderness, rage and grief are fully alive here. These poems blaze into the visionary.” ― Mary Szybist
Children/Young Adult Winner: I’ve Loved You Since Forever by Hoda Kotb
I’ve Loved You Since Forever is a celebratory and poetic testament to the timeless love felt between parent and child. This beautiful picture book is inspired by Today show co-anchor Hoda Kotb’s heartwarming adoption of her baby girl, Haley Joy. With Kotb’s lyrical text and stunning pictures by Suzie Mason, young ones and parents will want to snuggle up and read the pages of this book together, over and over again.
The International Latino Book Awards
The International Latino Book Awards aim to recognize, nurture, and assist in the development of both Latino authors and other authors whose work is covering and targeting the Latino community. Books are closed in a number of categories every year, and are awarded both to Spanish language and English language books. Because most of my readers do not speak Spanish, I have chosen to highlight the English language awards, but if Spanish language books are something you are interested, make sure to follow the link and check out the rest of the awards!
Best Latino-Focused Children’s Picture Book (English): The Little Migrant by Enrique Parrilla
“One day my mom came in the house crying. She said the bad men were not letting dad come home. I thought he would just have to work a few extra days, but he sure took a long time…”
The stark reality of the immigration crisis told through the eyes of a young girl escaping the cartel violence in search of a better life. This book tackles the complex issue of immigration in a format that allows children and adults to relate to the human cost of international politics.
Best Youth Latino Focused Chapter Book: The Crossroads by Alexandra Diaz
After crossing Mexico into the United States, Jaime Rivera thinks the worst is over. Starting a new school can’t be that bad. Except it is, and not just because he can barely speak English. While his cousin Ángela fits in quickly, with new friends and after-school activities, Jaime struggles with even the idea of calling this strange place “home.” His real home is with his parents, abuela, and the rest of the family; not here where cacti and cattle outnumber people, where he can no longer be himself—a boy from Guatemala.
This book is a sequel to The Only Road
Best Young Adult Latino Focused Book: Jazz Owls: A Novel of the Zoot Suit Riots by Margarita Engle
Thousands of young Navy sailors are pouring into Los Angeles on their way to the front lines of World War II. They are teenagers, scared, longing to feel alive before they have to face the horrors of battle. Hot jazz music spiced with cool salsa rhythms beckons them to dance with the local Mexican American girls, who jitterbug all night before working all day in the canneries. Proud to do their part for the war effort, these Jazz Owl girls are happy to dance with the sailors—until the blazing summer night when racial violence leads to murder.
Best Latino Focused Nonfiction Book – English: We Fed an Island: The True Story of Rebuilding Puerto Rico, One Meal at Time by José André
Based on Andrés’s insider’s take as well as on meetings, messages, and conversations he had while in Puerto Rico, We Fed an Island movingly describes how a network of community kitchens activated real change and tells an extraordinary story of hope in the face of disasters both natural and man-made, offering suggestions for how to address a crisis like this in the future.
Best Latino Focused Fiction Book: Irreversible Damage: The Katie Suarez Social Justice Series by JL Ruiz
In this first book of a series on contemporary social justice activism, Katie, the youngest daughter of two Mexican-American lawyers, has lived a sheltered upbringing in a wealthy Paradise Valley neighborhood of Phoenix. Life there never prepared her for the upheaval and tragedy that was to surround her and many of her loved ones. Katie learns that changes affecting her life were instigated by forces and people far removed from her, and whose greed for political and financial gain means more to them than the lives they sacrificed along the way.
Best Fiction Book Translation – Spanish to English: Mourning by Eduardo Halfon; translated by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn
In Mourning, Eduardo Halfon’s eponymous narrator travels to Poland, Italy, the U.S., and the Guatemalan countryside in search of secrets he can barely name. He follows memory’s strands back to his maternal roots in Jewish Poland and to the contradictory, forbidden stories of his father’s Lebanese-Jewish immigrant family, specifically surrounding the long-ago childhood death by drowning of his uncle Salomón. But what, or who, really killed Salomón? As he goes deeper, he realizes that the truth lies buried in his own past, in the brutal Guatemala of the 1970s and his subsequent exile to the American South.
The Miles Franklin Literary Prize
The Miles Franklin Literary Award is Australia’s most prestigious literature prize. Established through the will of My Brilliant Career author, Miles Franklin, the prize is awarded each year to a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases.
Winner: Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko
“Too Much Lip is driven by personal experience, historical injustice, anger and what in Indigenous vernacular could be described as ‘deadly Blak’ humour. Lucashenko weaves a (sometimes) fabulous tale with the very real politics of cultural survival to offer a story of hope and redemption for all Australians.”
I will be back later this week with more – thanks for reading!
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