Round-Up: National Book Foundation Lifetime Achievement Awards, Banned Books Weeks, and CURSED CHILD Sales
From the lifetime achievement awards of the National Book Foundation to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child sales, here are last week’s biggest literary headlines:
- Robert A. Caro and Cave Canem will receive lifetime achievement awards from the National Book Foundation during the National Book Awards ceremony on November 16. Caro is a journalist and biographer who is best known for his biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses. He will receive the twenty-ninth annual Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Cave Canem is the literary center dedicated to black American poetry that was founded in 1996 by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady. The center will receive the twelfth annual Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.
- Banned Books Week 2016 is in full swing, running until October 1. This year’s emphasis is on diverse books. The Banned Books Week Coalition writes, “While diversity is seldom given as a reason for a challenge, it seems, in fact, to be an underlying and unspoken factor.” The Coalition’s list of frequently challenged book with diverse content includes works by Sherman Alexie, Toni Morrison, Alison Bechdel, Maya Angelou, and Khaled Hosseini.
- The highly anticipated Harry Potter and the Cursed Child added almost $70 million in sales to Scholastic’s trade division for this quarter. This drove a 104 percent jump in revenue in the children’s book publishing and distribution division of the company. Additionally, Scholastic saw an increase from the backlist sales of other Potter titles. Scholastic’s international markets also profited from Cursed Child sales, with a 23 percent revenue gain in the international group.
