The honor is given annually to five writers under the age of 35 who have demonstrated excellence in fiction. Honorees are selected by previous National Book Award winners and finalists. Grace K was selected by Scott Spencer, author of Endless Love, A Ship Made of Paper, and the just-published Man in the Woods (buy his books!!!).
Grace will be honored at the 5 Under 35 Bash thrown by the National Book Foundation celebrating National Book Week, and the lead-up to the announcement of the National Book Awards. The bash is Monday, November 15, and will be hosted by Roseanne Cash and DJed by Rob Sheffield (author of Talking to Girls About Duran Duran).
Also, Grace will be reading/doing a live interview Monday, October 11 at 9EST/6PST on Two Dollar Radio's new video channel. The reading/interview will be hosted by the always-sweet HTML Giant.
Congrats, Grace! Pretty cool.
5 UNDER 35
FIFTH ANNUAL CELEBRATION OF YOUNG FICTION WRITERS
SELECTED BY NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNERS AND FINALISTS
NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION ALSO LOOKS BACK ON “25 UNDER 35,”
ALL THE HONOREES OF THE PAST FIVE YEARS
HOSTED BY ROSANNE CASH
ROB SHEFFIELD TO DJ
2010 marks the fifth year of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 selections, recognizing five young fiction writers chosen by National Book Award Winners and Finalists. Last year’s reading and party at powerHouse Arena in DUMBO, Brooklyn prompted The Huffington Post to publish a piece called “How to Throw a Party for Books: The NBA’s 5 Under 35 Event.” This year’s celebration will again be held at powerHouse Arena at the start of National Book Awards Week on Monday, November 15, hosted by musician and author Rosanne Cash with music journalist Rob Sheffield as DJ.
Leslie Shipman, Director of Programs at the National Book Foundation, comments, “In the five years of 5 Under 35, we’ve been thrilled to see many of our honorees go on to receive great acclaim. We’re delighted that 5 Under 35 provides us with an opportunity to recognize these young writers early in their careers, with the help of past National Book Award Winners and Finalists.”
The 2010 5 Under 35 Honorees are:
Sarah Braunstein, The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (W.W. Norton & Co., 2011)
Selected by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, National Book Award Fiction Finalist for
Madeleine Is Sleeping, 2004
Grace Krilanovich, The Orange Eats Creeps (Two Dollar Radio, 2010)
Selected by Scott Spencer, Fiction Finalist for A Ship Made of Paper, 2003; Fiction Finalist for Endless Love, 1980 and 1981
Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife (Random House, 2011)
Selected by Colum McCann, Fiction Winner for Let the Great World Spin, 2009
Tiphanie Yanique, How to Escape from a Leper Colony (Graywolf, 2010)
Selected by Jayne Anne Phillips, Fiction Finalist for Lark and Termite, 2009
Paul Yoon, Once the Shore (Sarabande, 2009)
Selected by Kate Walbert, Fiction Finalist for Our Kind, 2004
(Biographies for 5 Under 35 honorees and National Book Award authors at end of release.)
With its fifth year of 5 Under 35 selections, the National Book Foundation now honors 25 writers under 35, including Ceridwen Dovey, Samantha Hunt, Bret Anthony Johnston, Nam Le, Dinaw Mengestu, ZZ Packer, Anya Ulinich, Josh Weil, and Charles Yu, selected by past National Book Award Winners and Finalists such as Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Franzen, Mary Gaitskill, Charles Johnson, and Christine Schutt.
The 2010 list of books reflects a range of publishers from Two Dollar Radio to Random House. Among the 2010 5 Under 35 honorees’ early accomplishments, Tiphanie Yanique is a 2010 Rona Jaffe Foundation Award Winner, an award which Sarah Braunstein won in 2007; Grace Krilanovich was a finalist for the Starcherone Prize; Paul Yoon’s Once the Shore was a New York Times Notable Book; and Téa Obreht was named one of The New Yorker’s 2010 “20 Under 40.” Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, the National Book Award Finalist who selected Sarah Braunstein for 5 Under 35, was also on the “20 Under 40” list.
At this year’s 5 Under 35 party, the young writers will be introduced by the National Book Award Winners and Finalists who selected them and will each give a brief reading. Author Amanda Stern, host of the first 5 Under 35 event in 2006, will interview the honorees and Winners and Finalists during the party. Party guests will be invited to pose for portraits by The Photo Booth Party. Food will again be provided by the Red Hook Food Vendors and wine by Brooklyn Oenology. The Foundation will continue its tradition of having a musician/author, Rosanne Cash, host the event and an author with a musical slant, Rob Sheffield, provide the soundtrack for the evening.
For more information on this year’s 5 Under 35 honorees and past 5 Under 35 celebrations, please visit
http://www.nationalbook.org/5under35.html.
This event is by invitation only. Press interested in attending should contact Sherrie Young at
syoung@nationalbook.org.
5 Under 35 Honorees
Sarah Braunstein is the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Writers' Award. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and lives in Portland, Maine. Her novel, The Sweet Relief of Missing Children, will be published by W.W. Norton in 2011.
Grace Krilanovich has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow and a finalist for the Starcherone Prize. Her first book, The Orange Eats Creeps, is the only novel to be excerpted twice in the literary magazine Black Clock.
Téa Obreht was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia, and spent her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States in 1997. After graduating from the University of Southern California, Téa received her MFA in Fiction from the Creative Writing Program at Cornell University in 2009. Her first novel, The Tiger's Wife, will be published by Random House in 2011. Her fiction debut—an excerpt of The Tiger's Wife in The New Yorker—was selected for the The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010. Her second publication, the short story The Laugh, was published in the summer 2009 fiction issue of The Atlantic, and will be anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2010. Téa currently lives in Ithaca, New York.
Tiphanie Yanique is from the Hospital Ground neighborhood of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. She is an assistant professor of Creative Writing and Caribbean Literature at Drew University and an associate editor with Post-No-Ills. Her first book, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, was published by Graywolf in 2010. She lives between Brooklyn, New York and St. Thomas.
Paul Yoon was born in New York City. His first book, Once the Shore, was a New York Times Notable Book; a Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Publishers Weekly, and Minneapolis Star Tribune Best Book of the Year; and selected as a Best Debut of the Year by National Public Radio. He is the recipient of an O. Henry Award, the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares, and his work has appeared in One Story, American Short Fiction, Glimmer Train, and The Best American Short Stories. He currently resides in Baltimore with the fiction writer Laura van den Berg.
National Book Award Authors
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a Finalist for the 2004 National Book Award and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her fiction has appeared in several magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Tin House, The Georgia Review, and The Best American Short Stories 2004 and 2009. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and an NEA Fellowship, she directs the MFA program in writing at the University of California, San Diego. She lives in Los Angeles and was recently named one of “20 Under 40” fiction writers by The New Yorker.
Colum McCann's newest novel, Let the Great World Spin, won the 2009 National Book Award and is a New York Times bestseller. He is the author of two collections of short stories and five novels, including This Side of Brightness, Dancer, and Zoli, all of which were international bestsellers. His fiction has been published in 30 languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, The Paris Review, Bomb, and other places. He has written for numerous publications, including The Irish Times, Die Zeit, La Repubblica, Paris Match, The New York Times, the Guardian, and The Independent. In 2003 Colum was named Esquire magazine's "Writer of the Year." Other awards and honors include a Pushcart Prize, the Rooney Prize, a French Chevalier des arts et lettres, and the Hennessy Award for Irish Literature. Colum was born in Dublin in 1965 and began his career as a journalist at The Irish Press. Colum teaches at Hunter College in New York, in the Creative Writing program, with fellow novelists Peter Carey and Nathan Englander.
Jayne Anne Phillips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia. She is the author of four novels, MotherKind (2000), Shelter (1994), Machine Dreams (1984), and Lark and Termite (2009), and two collections of widely anthologized stories, Fast Lanes (1987) and Black Tickets (1979). She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Bunting Fellowship. She has been awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction (1980) and an Academy Award in Literature (1997) by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been translated into twelve languages, and has appeared in Granta, Harper’s, DoubleTake, and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. She is currently Professor of English and Director of the MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey. Her most recent novel, Lark and Termite, was a National Book Award Finalist in 2009.
Scott Spencer is the author of ten novels, including Man in the Woods, A Ship Made of Paper, Waking the Dead, and the international bestseller Endless Love. He has written for Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The New Yorker, GQ, and Harper's, and has taught writing at Columbia University, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Williams College, and the Bard Prison Initiative. He lives in Rhinebeck, New York.
Kate Walbert is the author of the novels A Short History of Women, named one of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2009, Our Kind, a Finalist for the National Book Award in 2004, and The Gardens of Kyoto, winner of the Connecticut Book Award for best fiction in 2002, as well as the New York Times Notable story collection, Where She Went. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize Stories, and numerous other publications. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and taught fiction writing at Yale for many years. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughters.
The 5 Under 35 Celebration’s Host
Rosanne Cash has recorded fourteen albums charting twenty-one Top 40 country singles, 11 of which made it to # 1, and two gold records. She has received ten Grammy nominations—winning in 1985—and was nominated this year for “Sea of Heartbreak,” a duet with Bruce Springsteen on her current CD, The List. Cash achieved the highest chart position of her career with the debut of The List. The album, which Vanity Fair called “superb,” debuted in the Top 5 on the Country Chart, and entered The Billboard 200 at No. 22. Cash is the author of Bodies of Water and the children’s book Penelope Jane: A Fairy’s Tale. Her essays and fiction have been published in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and New York magazine. Her memoir, Composed, was published by Viking in 2010. She lives in New York City with her husband and children.
The 5 Under 35 Celebration’s Featured DJRob Sheffield has been a music journalist for more than twenty years. He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he writes about music, TV, and pop culture, and regularly appears on MTV and VH1. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Love Is a Mix Tape, which has been translated into French, German, Italian, Swedish, Japanese, Russian, and other languages he cannot read. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
The Mission of the National Book Foundation is to celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of good writing in America.
About the National Book Awards:The nation’s most prestigious literary prize, the National Book Award has a stellar record of identifying and rewarding quality writing. In 1950, William Carlos Williams was the first winner in Poetry, the following year William Faulkner was honored in Fiction, and so on through the years. Many previous Winners of a National Book Award are now firmly established in the canon of American literature. On November 17th, the National Book Awards will be presented in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature.
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