Neustadt in the News
Have you ever wondered what books influenced and shaped famous writers? Brain Pickings has a reading list of 24 books that impacted Neustadt prizewinner Gabriel García Márquez.
In commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, the Huffington Post published this speech written by recent Neustadt juror Andrew Lam. Lam delivered the speech last year to high school students working to raise funds for flood victims in Vietnam.
The Guardian recently featured a piece on the surprising friendship of poets Thom Gunn and Neustadt prizewinner Elizabeth Bishop: “Their insistence on finding a tone which almost explored and then almost disguised their experiences, and their great, astringent withholding, seem finally to have worked wonders for the readers of their poems in these years after their deaths.”
The late Seamus Heaney was an admirer of Neustadt prizewinner Tomas Tranströmer’s work. This article in the Irish Times highlights Tranströmer’s accomplishments and key life moments.
Nobel laureate Günter Grass passed away in Lübeck, Germany, at the age of eighty-seven. In this tribute, Theodore Ziolkowski talks about Grass’s effect on the German literary scene and his unmistakable literary voice. Grass was also twice nominated for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in the 1980s.
Fun Finds and Inspiration
The American Library Association released its top 10 most frequently challenged titles in the US in 2014. Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian topped the list.
