May 2020 In Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

2020 in books: a literary calendar
Guardian, January 4, 2020

Festivals and Awards

In May, the Pulitzer Prizes have already been awarded to American writers and artists, despite the coronavirus.

- The prizes for journalism were given, for example, to a grim-sounding feature article, "Guantánamo's Darkest Secret," printed last April in the New Yorker by Ben Taub.
- Novelist Colson Whitehead won the Fiction prize for his tale, The Nickel Boys, of a Floridian reform school. It is based on a real-life school that was reported on ten or so years ago for its unbelievable abuses, from torture to murder, of the teenagers who attended it.
- The Biography jurors awarded their accolade to Benjamin Moser's Sontag, about the New Yorker intellectual, writer, and critic Susan Sontag.

*

The Hay Festival, the British books institution, will be taking place later in the month, from May 22nd to May 30th. But its events will be posted as online videos; the Festival offers:

Free live broadcasts and interactive Q+As from over 100 of the world's greatest writers and thinkers share their insights and interrogate some of the biggest issues of our time, from Covid-19 and world health to the climate crisis and our future.

The programme schedule is due to be published on May 6th, too late to be included in this blog post.

*

"Linde von Linn" (Switzerland)
Photograph by S. Wernli, June 2006
via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5 License

Lastly, the International Booker Prize was to be announced on May 19th, but it has been postponed indefinitely. In the meantime, the shortlist is here:

• The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree A writer in Farsi who lives in Australia, Shokoofeh Azar writes about an Iranian family that is forced to flee Tehran for the countryside, after the Iranian Revolution.
• The Adventures of China Iron Gabriela Cabezón Cámara writes a novel set in her home country Argentina in the 19th century, as a woman flees her household in the company of a Scottish settler and interprets the colonialized and nationalized world around her.
• Tyll Eulenspiegel The famous German trickster figure, Till Eulenspiegel, runs amok in the tormented country during the  Thirty Years' War, in Daniel Kehlmann's narration.
• Hurricane Season Written by a thirty-something Mexican journalist and author, Fernanda Melchor, Hurricane Season takes place in the fictional Mexican countryside, where a 'witch' is found drowned in a river. The book tracks down why she was killed.
• The Memory Police A dystopian tale by Yoko Ogawa, it is set on an island where things that disappear from sight are supposed to be forgotten, and those who do not forget are persecuted by the authorities.
• The Discomfort of Evening Written by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, a Dutch writer, this novel depicts a rural family that is befallen by gloom when the girl protagonist wishes that her brother won't return from an outing, and her wish is granted.