Festival Writers Win Kirkus Prize

From npr.org:

It’s the 10th year of the Kirkus Prize. Meet the winners of a top literary award

The Kirkus Prize, a leading literary award, has been awarded this year to authors Ariel Aberg-Riger, Héctor Tobar and James McBride. The prize selects winners in the categories of fiction, nonfiction and young reader’s literature from a pool of nearly 11,000 authors whose books appeared in Kirkus Reviews, the influential journal known for starred prepublication reviews.

Established 10 years ago, the prize includes a cash award of $50,000 per author. “History and community emerged as central themes in the most outstanding works of literature published this year,” Kirkus Reviews publisher Meg Kuehn said in a statement. “We see these ideas come to life in wildly different ways in all three of this year’s winners, each one compelling from beginning to end, begging to be celebrated, discussed, and shared.

“Fiction winner James McBride has long been well known on the awards circuit; his numerous bestselling books include his 1995 memoir The Color of Water and the novel The Good Lord Bird, which won a National Book Award in 2013. McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store was described by judges as “a boisterous hymn to community, mercy, and karmic justice.”

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James McBride is an award-winning author, musician and screenwriter. His landmark memoir, The Color of Water, has sold millions of copies and spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list. Considered an American classic, it is read in schools and universities across the United States. His debut novel, Miracle at St. Anna, was turned into a film by Oscar-winning writer and director Spike Lee, with a script written by McBride. His 2013 novel, The Good Lord Bird, about American abolitionist John Brown, won the National Book Award for Fiction and was a Showtime limited series starring Ethan Hawke.

McBride has been a staff writer for The Boston Globe, People Magazine and The Washington Post, and his work has appeared in Essence, Rolling Stone and The New York Times. He will appear at the 2024 Festival.

Héctor Tobar is the author of six books published in fifteen languages, including, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of Latino. Tobar won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the L.A. riots for the Los Angeles Times. His other books include the New York Times bestseller: Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle That Set Them Free. Deep Down Dark was adapted into the film The 33, starring Antonio Banderas. Héctor is a Professor of English and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He’s written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s and National Geographic, and was a contributing writer for The New York Times opinion page. He appeared at the 2016 Festival.