Skip to main content

Jonathan Escoffery Wins Plimpton Prize; Leigh Newman Wins Terry Southern Prize

Left, Jonathan Escoffery (Photo: Colwill Brown); Right, Leigh Newman (Photo: Christopher Gabello)

 

The Paris Review’s Spring Revel is coming up on April 7. At the Revel, we present annual prizes for outstanding contributions to the magazine, and it is with great pleasure that we announce our honorees for the 2020 Plimpton Prize and the 2020 Southern Prize.

This year’s Plimpton Prize is awarded to Jonathan Escoffery for his story “Under the Ackee Tree,” from our Summer 2019 issue. Escoffery’s “Under the Ackee Tree” follows three generations of a family split between Jamaica and Florida. Escoffery tracks the ways in which fathers and sons misunderstand each other, and the nuanced loss and pain endured by immigrant families, with a keen eye to language and pathos. How do you make things right? As he writes:

If you’re a man who utterly failed his child, you can either lie down to join him in death, or you can do more for those remaining.

The Plimpton Prize for Fiction, presented annually since 1993, is a $10,000 award given to a new voice in fiction. Named after our longtime editor George Plimpton, it commemorates The Paris Review’s zeal for discovering new writers and celebrates an outstanding story written by an emerging writer published by The Paris Review in the previous calendar year.

Upon hearing the news that he had won the Plimpton Prize for Fiction, Jonathan shared, “I don’t know that you can plan to win a prize, but you can dream about it, and I’ve dreamed of winning the Plimpton Prize for Fiction for a very long time.”

At the Spring Revel, the Plimpton Prize will be presented by the novelist Alice McDermott.

This year’s Southern Prize will be presented to Leigh Newman for “Howl Palace,” from our Fall 2019 issue. In Newman’s “Howl Palace,” an Alaskan woman revisits her adventurous past as she prepares to sell her “unique” lakeside home:

To the families on the lake, my home is a bit of an institution. And not just for the wolf room, which my agent suggested we leave off the list of amenities, as most people wouldn’t understand what we meant.

The Terry Southern Prize, presented since 2003, is a $5,000 award honoring “humor, wit, and sprezzatura” in work from either The Paris Review or the Daily. It’s named for Terry Southern, a driving force behind the early Paris Review perhaps best known as a screenwriter behind Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider.

When she heard she’d won the Southern Prize, Leigh shared, “I’m moved and honored—not just because of the caliber of the authors associated with the Terry Southern Prize, authors I deeply admire—but because working on ‘Howl Palace’ with Emily and Hasan, getting to profit from their deeply considered editing, was one of the greatest joys of my writerly life.”

At the Spring Revel, the Southern Prize will be presented by the cartoonist Roz Chast.

We look forward to celebrating the honorees and their work at the 2020 Spring Revel on April 7, at Cipriani 25 Broadway in downtown Manhattan. That night, we will be joined by the 2020 Revel benefit chairs, actor, writer, and director Greta Gerwig and writer and director Noah Baumbach. Singer, songwriter, and musician Bruce Springsteen will present our Hadada Award for lifetime achievement to Richard Ford. Tickets are available on our site.

We are also proud to mention that The Paris Review won the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction for our submission of three stories, two of which were 2020 Plimpton Prize honoree Jonathan Escoffery’s “Under the Ackee Tree” and 2020 Southern Prize honoree Leigh Newman’s “Howl Palace.” Rounding out our winning submission was Kimberly King Parsons’s “Foxes,” from our Summer 2019 issue.

Congratulations to the winners! We hope you will join us to celebrate them, and to usher in a new decade of groundbreaking literature.



from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/2TqPR2v

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more