THE PALE OF SETTLEMENT by Margot Singer has won the 2008 Glasgow/Shenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers. Final judge Cathy Hankla, who selected the winning title, writes:THE PALE OF SETTLEMENT is a stunning collection of interwoven narratives that delves deep into the human need for both belonging and moral integrity. Singer examines origins, cruelties and beliefs in the context of the nefarious nature of memory as a vehicle for obtaining truth. While some of Singer’s characters are literally digging for material shards that might prove ancient texts valid, the ashes of another character are by chance winds. Impermanence and timeless truth struggle in these pages, finding characters, language and form that are at once recognizable and original.Singer’s short story collection, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, also received an honorable mention for the 2008 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was a finalist for the 2008 John Gardner Fiction Book Award.
Congratulations as well to David Kirby. The prolific Kirby, who has published two essay collections with the UGA Press, ULTRA-TALK and WHAT IS A BOOK?, has just won a Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Book Award for his LSU Press poetry collection The House on Boulevard Street. SIBA Book Awards titles are nominated and voted on by hundreds of independent booksellers from across the South. 2008 marks a new chapter in the SIBA Book Awards; from now on the awards ceremony will be held at the AJC Decatur Book Festival.
Images:
Top: Jacket for The Pale of Settlement.
Bottom: Margot Singer by Tim DeGenero.
