Alon Hilu, winner of this year's prestigious Sapir Prize for literature, will be forced to give back the NIS 150,000 award after the Legal Forum for the Land of Israel raised concerns of a conflict of interest between him and one of the judges, former Meretz leader Yossi Sarid.

one of my all-time favorite genres is the memoir of literary obsession -- that aesthetic wreck at the intersection of biography, confession, literary criticism, travelogue, love letter, and detective story

I love pointing out to my interns just how shitty and self-involved the publishing world is when it comes to understanding the market. There's no such thing as market research in publishing, but if you ask an editor he/she won't hesitate to claim that "there is no market" for certain books in translation. And then along comes Bolano, or Muriel Barbery ... I think there is a craving for genuinely good literature.

Aleksandar Hemon prefers to talk about a Lazarus reading in California to which exactly six people turned up: three friends, a Holocaust researcher from the university and two old ladies who had meant to go a cookbook presentation but were too polite to leave. 'In Germany you get introduced by a prominent critic, and all you have to do is read and answer their questions -- they personally vouch for the quality of the book and the people buy it. In America, on the other hand, you have to do all of this alone: you have to be nice and funny and really work the crowd to get them interested in you and buy your book.

You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that's two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review.

While the Nordic countries cannot compare with France, the Netherlands, or Great Britain when it comes to classical colonialism, this is no reason not to discuss their colonial past

I don't think in Europe it's such a big deal. People are talking about it, but I see much more concern in American publishing. I think a lot of it has to do with the way books and literature are dealt with in the media. It's very hard in the mass media in the U.S. to get exposure for books. There's very little space, and a lot of newspapers are shrinking their space. But if you go to Europe, you find that a lot of newspapers and TV shows and radio shows are constantly featuring writers. It's part of people's lives. Here it seems like only serious readers are concerned about those things. Books and literature don't seem to be part of the mainstream. Which is a shame.

Petersen, 33, was presented with the prestigious Bachmann Prize on Sunday in Klagenfurt, Austria, for his yet-to-be-published novel entitled Bis dass der Tod ... ("Until death ..."). The prize is endowed with 25,000 euros ($35,000).

The book, which is set in an "apocalyptic landscape" and which the jury generally described as "oppressive," tells the story of a man who shoots and kills his girlfriend, who had been chronically ill for many years.

In 1983, the scandal-factor hit its peak when author Rainald Goetz ran a razor blade across his forehead during the reading and continued on, blood streaming down his face.

While the Nazis, cheered on by Hamsun, were deporting more than 700 Norwegian Jews to Auschwitz in the autumn of 1942, Undset was a leading activist in the Bergson Group's campaign of rallies, newspaper ads and Washington lobbying for US action to save the Jews. Yet there is no word from Oslo about any plans by the Norwegian government to hold any year-long celebration of her life and work, nor to erect a statue of her, nor even to sponsor an exhibit acknowledging her literary and moral achievements.

Through the writers' eyes, i look at the region, its people, their culture and literature use literature to knit India closer.

Literary trends swing like a pendulum. For instance, poetry has started to sell well and, in recent times, lots of new poets have come up. This was not the case 20 years ago when short story writers ruled. But many have also said that poetry doesn't sell anymore. In general, the reading habit sustains. No language is in danger of vanishing except perhaps Manipuri, Indian Nepali, Sindhi; cases where the number of people who speak the language is very limited. There book sales and the number of magazines are diminishing. But languages like Tamil, Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam are flourishing.

He, however, disagrees with some who suggest writers should participate in the marketing of their books.

"It is unethical for a writer to become a vendor peddling books in the street. My satisfaction comes when I know that I have imparted knowledge. If money comes in the process then so be it."

Barcelona, June 23, 2009

Ladies and gentlemen,

       I have just been informed that my book Les Bienveillantes -- Eumenides in Greek -- has been awarded the Athens Prize for Literature. I am very touched by this honor, all the more so as it has been granted in and by the very city where those same Eumenides, pacified at last, were once settled "in honor for the rest of time," to make "their home at Athene's side."

       In the days when Aeschylus wrote his great tragedy, literature was a public affair, the affair of every citizen. It was a political affair, in which the most fundamental values and problems of the polis would be invoked and debated, a religious affair too, an affair of ethics as much as aesthetics. Judgment of the work was thus the business of the whole city. The prize that was awarded incarnated the public's sense that the work had, in some important way, contributed to the public good, and the prize ceremony, like all political and religious ceremonies of the time, was a public event, one worthy of record, to be remembered by succeeding generations.

       Today, the matter is different. While literature may touch on affairs of politics or religion, it no longer participates directly in them. Even when it seeks to explore the deepest questions besetting mankind, it now properly belongs, in the common view, to that sphere of human activity known as "culture." The divorce, one might say, is complete. This fact in itself is neither admirable nor deplorable, it is simply a state of affairs. And as such it implies new roles, new responsibilities. It has always been my view that literature is a very private matter now, and that what takes place between a writer and his work belongs to a sphere utterly separate from the interaction of that work with those who read it, comment it, praise it or damn it. Privacy, for me, is a fundamental condition of creation, of work. It was so before my book was published, and must remain so now. It is in this spirit that I express my hope that my inability to join you today will be taken for what it is, an expression of our common love for literature. I thank you very much.

Jonathan Littell

The novel had sold a combined 1.45 million copies as of June 19, with the first volume, Book 1, selling 780,000 copies and the second, Book 2, selling 670,000 copies.

After writing Kafka on the Shore , I spent seven years rendering one American classic after another into Japanese. Among them were Chandler's The Long Goodbye, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Every one of the sentences in these books represents really splendid English.

I started the translation task only after I felt confident of my ability to do it responsibly as a translator and I was pleased to subsequently be able to see it through to the end. After that, however, I found myself somewhat distanced from novels by contemporary American writers. So, the thought occurred to me that it was time to work out what I should do by myself, instead of trying to learn something new from others.

Q: Since the onset of the global economic depression, the cultural prestige of the United States has been on the wane.

A: Although I held U.S. newspapers and magazines in high esteem, that country's media outlets have been rapidly enervated since the Iraq war as their arguments have vacillated and grown erratic. Publishing houses, too, are languid in the United States.

What book changed your life?

Paul Muldoon's book of poems Meeting the British (1987). I was lucky to be taught by him at university. He showed me how to mix aesthetic, political and personal concerns in the same artwork.

This city of Klagenfurt which every June, at linden blossom time, for more than thirty years now, allows itself be celebrated as capital of German-language literature, is probably the only town in central Europe with more than 100,000 inhabitants, which has no municipal library of its own, in a province, in which the then, meanwhile cremated provincial governor together with the Roman Catholic chairman of the so-called Christian Social People's Party -- who one year ago survived a serious car accident and after his recovery humbly told his friends, that, to use his own words, "Lourdes-Mary" saved his life in the car accident -- last year, when the Carinthian Hypo Bank was sold, this Carinthian Christian Social Party chairman and the former Carinthian Provincial Governor, who has since made himself scarce along with his ashes, last year, these two like a pair of gangsters, helped a tax consultant from Villach to a fee of 6 million Euros from the assets of the province, for two months of oral advice, and handily enough this Villach tax consultant is also the personal tax consultant of the Carinthian Christian Social politician whose life, heaven and the Lord be thanked, Lourdes Mary saved in a car accident.