Book News

Louis Rubin Honored

Louis D. Rubin, Jr., retired UNC English professor and founder of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, was presented the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters at a ceremony held in New York City on May 19th. The award of $7,500 honors a writer of exceptional accomplishment in any literary genre.

This is the second major award for Rubin this spring. In March during the conference of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, Louis Rubin was the 2004 recipient of the Richard Beale Davis Award, which is given to celebrate a lifetime of distinguished service to the study of Southern Literature. [photo credit: Curt Richter]

Terry Kay Awarded the Townsend Prize

Terry Kay was presented the Townsend Prize for Fiction in Atlanta on April 21, 2004. A literary icon in Georgia, Kay was honored for his current novel The Valley of the Light.

The Townsend Prize for Fiction is the oldest and most distinguished literary award in Georgia. It is presented biennially to the Georgia writer judged to have published the best book of fiction in the previous two years.

Previous winners of the Townsend Prize include: Celestine Sibley, Alice Walker, Philip Lee Williams, Mary Hood, Sara Flanigan, Ferrol Sams, Charlie Smith, Pam Durban, JoAllen Bradham, Judson Mitcham, James Kilgo, and Ha Jin.

Sue Monk Kidd Presented Literature to Life Award

Sue Monk Kidd, author of The Secret Life of Bees, received the inaugural Literature to Life Award in April. The presentation was made by Nathan Lane. The evening also included the debut Literature to Life solo performance of the novel by Denise Wilbanks.

Educational rights to the novel are owned by the American Place Theatre, which produces, adapts and stages novels and oral histories for a variety of venues, among them the Library of Congress and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Sponsored by Penguin Books, the American Place Theatre's Literature to Life program is a marriage of theater, literature and education, with the aim of encouraging creative drama "as a means of student self-expression and a catalyst to literacy."

Kidd joins other writers whose work has been introduced to the stage by the American Place Theatre, including: S.J. Perelman, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Lowell, Donald Barthelme, Sylvia Plath, Robert Coover, Paul Goodman, Anne Sexton, May Swenson and Robert Penn Warren.

The Fitzgeralds Take London Stage

A new musical by Les Reed, Roger Cook and Kit Hesketh Harvey depicts the turbulent lives of Zelda and F.Scott Fitzgerald. The Beautiful and the Damned opened May 10th at London’s Lyric Theatre. 

The Fitzgeralds are iconic figures of the American Jazz Age. Scott, who wrote the books “The Beautiful and the Damned,” “The Great Gatsby” and “Tender Is The Night,” and Zelda was a modern Southern Belle from Alabama, but she was doom to a tragic end. Zelda died in a North Carolina sanitarium and Scott eventually succumbed to the effects of alcoholism.

Roger Cook and Les Reed are both among the United Kingdom’s most distinguished songwriters. Cook wrote more than 80 Top 30 hits, including “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart”, “Something Tells Me” and “I’d Like to Teach The World to Sing”. Reed has won ten Ivor Novello awards and wrote standards such as “It’s Not Unusual”, “Delilah” and “The Last Waltz”.