Former Czech president and writer Václav Havel died Sunday.  Imprisoned by the Communist regime for four years, Havel led the 1989 Velvet Revolution which precipitated the end of totalitarian rule in Czechoslovakia.

Several of the plays Havel wrote satirized the Soviet-backed leaders of his country.  During his presidency, Czechoslovakia joined NATO and the European Union, but Havel was unable to prevent the nation’s split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Library resources: writing by and about Havel

The 62^nd annual National Book Awards were presented in New York City Wednesday evening.  Jesmyn Ward received the fiction award for her Hurricane Katrina novel Salvage the Bones.   “As the storm approaches, the Batiste family’s story takes on the resonance of one of the Greek myths.”   Stephen Greenblatt won the nonfiction prize for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, “a dramatic account of the Renaissance era rediscovery of the Latin poet Lucretius.”

The poetry prize went to Nikky Finney for Head Off & Split, “an impassioned summation of African-American history.”  The prize for Young People’s Literature was awarded to Thanhha Lai for Inside Out & Back Again, about a Vietnamese girl who is forced to leave her Saigon home for America, “the classic immigration tale, powerfully and beautifully shared by an authentic narrator.”

English writer Julian Barnes was announced yesterday as winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending.  The annual award is given for the best full-length novel written by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland.  Barnes had made the shortlist three previous times, but this is his first award.

The other shortlisted authors for this year’s prize were Carol Birch for Jamrach’s Menagerie, Patrick deWitt for The Sisters Brothers, Esi Edugyan for Half Blood Blues, Stephen Kelman for Pigeon English, and Andrew Miller for Snowdrops.

The chair of this year’s panel of judges said that The Sense of an Ending had “the markings of a classic of English Literature.  It is exquisitely written, subtly plotted and reveals new depths with each reading.”

The National Book Foundation today announced 21 finalists for its 2011 National Book Awards, including the following:

Fiction

Andrew Krivak, The Sojourn

Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife

Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic

Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision

Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

Nonfiction

Deborah Baker, The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism 

Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution

Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention

Lauren Redniss, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout

Other finalists include six authors in the category of Young People’s Literature and five in Poetry.

The winners will be announced in New York City on November 16^th.

Poet Tomas Tranströmer of Sweden was announced today as recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature.  The Swedish Academy awarded Tranströmer the prize “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.”  This year marks the first time since 1996 that the award has gone to poetry.

Tranströmer’s work is characterized by a lack of embellishment but powerful imagery, often incorporating his own experiences and his love of music and nature.

Although this is the first time since 1974 that has Swede has been honored with the prize, and Tranströmer has been a perennial favorite for the award, the Swedish Academy has been criticized for being Euro-centric.  Seven of the last ten winners have been Europeans.

Library resources: some of Tranströmer’s poems

Michael Hart, the man credited with inventing the eBook, died last week in Urbana, Illinois at the age of 64.  In 1971, Hart, an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, was given time on a mainframe computer.  He used part of it to type in the Declaration of Independence, and posted a notice letting users (“all 100 of them”) of the new Internet know what he had done.

This was the beginning of Project Gutenberg, an effort to digitize literature in the public domain.  It grew slowly at first, but today the volunteer-run project comprises 36,000 free ebooks, in 60 different languages and a range of formats.  A friend remembers Hart as a man who “sacrificed personal luxury to fight for literacy, and for preservation of public domain rights and resources, towards the greater good.”

Library resources: eBooks

The Dayton Literary Peace Prize committee has announced its 2011 nominees.  67 fiction and nonfiction works have been nominated for helping lead readers to a better understanding of other cultures, peoples, religions, and political points of view.  The honors will be awarded in November.

Barbara Kingsolver will be the recipient of the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, given in conjunction with the Literary Peace Prize.  The Holbrooke Award is given to an author whose works focus on a central message of peace, broadly defined as increasing understanding between and among people.

The chair of the selection committee describes Kingsolver as “a writer of elegant and graceful prose, [who] leaves the reader with a sense of urgency about the topic she cares for most: the complex nature of what it takes to live together peacefully and creatively.”

Among the nominees for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in fiction are:

Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, by Maaza Mengiste

The Gendarme, by Mark Mustian

How to Read the Air, by Dinaw Mengestu

I Hotel, by Karen Tei Yamashita

The Invisible Bridge, by Julie Orringer

Kapitoil, by Teddy Wayne

The Long Song, by Andrea Levy

The Lotus Eaters, by Tatjana Soli

One Amazing Thing, by Chitra Divakaruni

The Patience Stone, by Atiq Rahimi

Russian Winter, by Daphne Kalotay

Salvation City, by Sigrid Nunez

Small Kingdoms, by Anastasia Hobbet

Solar, by Ian McEwan

Something Red, by Jennifer Gilmore

The Surrendered, by Chang-rae Lee

To the End of the Land, by David Grossman

Vida, by Patricia Engel

Nonfiction nominees include:

Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential— And Endangered, by Maia Szalavitz

The Bomb, by Howard Zinn

The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith, by Stephanie Saldana

Conversations with Myself, by Nelson Mandela

Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978, by Kai Bird

The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macorís, by Mark Kurlansky

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee

I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity, by Abuelaish Izzeldin

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

Let the Swords Encircle Me: Iran— A Journey behind the Headlines, by Scott Peterson

Little Princes: One Man’s Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal, by Conor Grennan

Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan, by Derek Leebaert

Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland, by Stephan Salisbury

Nomad: From Islam to America— A Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends, by Tom Segev

The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam, by Eliza Griswold

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story Of America’s Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand

Walking Israel: A Personal Search for the Soul of a Nation, by Martin Fletcher

The Librarian of Congress yesterday announced Philip Levine as U.S. Poet Laureate for 2011-2012.  Levine is the author of 20 poetry collections (as well as nonfiction), and among other honors, has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Librarian of Congress James Billington describes Levine is “one of America’s great narrative poets.  His plainspoken lyricism has, for half a century, championed the art of telling ‘The Simple Truth’— about working in a Detroit auto factory, as he has, and about the hard work we do to make sense of our lives.”

The Poet Laureate opens the literary season in October and closes it in May.   In recent years, laureates have initiated projects that broaden the audiences for poetry.

Library resources: Works by Levine

The program for this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival was announced last week.  The festival’s theme is “Revolution in the 21^st Century.”  Fiction writers including Hisham Matar, Kamila Shamsie, Gao Xingjian, and Ahdaf Soueif will speak about their works.  Writers of nonfiction, including Dava Sobel, Peter Ackroyd, and Melvyn Bragg will be on hand to discuss revolutions past.

The August event will feature 800 authors from 40 countries.  Michael Ondaatje will be launching his latest novel, The Cat’s Table; A.S. Byatt will preview Ragnarok, a re-imagining of Norse myth; and Sapphire will unveil The Kid, her follow-up to Push, basis for the Oscar-winning film “Precious.”

Serbian American writer (and USC grad) Téa Obreht last week was awarded the Orange Prize for Fiction for her novel The Tiger’s Wife.  At 25, she is the youngest winner of the U.K. prize awarded annually for the best writing by a woman in the English language.

Obreht beat out the favorite, Emma Donoghue’s Room.  Others on the short list included Aminatta Forna for The Memory of Love, Emma Henderson for Grace Williams Says it Loud, Nicole Krauss for Great House and Kathleen Winter for Annabel.

The award’s chair stated that “by skillfully spinning a series of magical tales [Obreht] has managed to bring the tragedy of chronic Balkan conflict thumping into our front rooms with a bittersweet vivacity.”