Our 2011 Paris Literary Prize jury included Erica Wagner, Breyten Breytenbach, Darin Strauss and Dennis Loy Johnson. Over 450 novellas were submitted for the prize. To view the winners and the short-list, please visit our 2011 Prize page.

 

Erica Wagner is Literary Editor of The Times and writes a weekly column in the Saturday Review section of the paper. She has interviewed many of the world's leading writers. Erica’s books include Gravity, a collection of short stories, and Ariel's Gift, a biographical gloss on Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters. Her novel, Seizure, was published in Britain and the US in 2007. Seizure is published in France as La Coupure by Au-delà du Raisonnable. She has judged many literary prizes; the Man Booker, the Orange Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Forward Prize. She lives in London with her husband and son. www.ericawagner.co.uk

 

 

Breyten Breytenbach is a South African writer, painter and activist. He left South Africa in 1960 as a result of his horror at apartheid. He is recognized as one of the finest living poets of the Afrikaans language. On a return to his homeland in 1975, Breytenbach was arrested under the Terrorism Act and jailed for seven years. Out of this experience he wrote Mouroir: Mirrornotes of a Novel and The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist. He is also author of Voice Over: A Nomadic Conversation with Mahmoud Darwish as well as various collections of poetry and essays. Breytenbach now lives in Paris and New York.

 

Darin Strauss is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and a winner of the American Library Association's Alix Award and The National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the internationally-bestselling author of the novels Chang & Eng, The Real McCoy, More Than It Hurts You, and the NBCC-winning memoir Half a Life. These have been New York Times Notable Books, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon, Chicago Tribune, and NPR Best Books of the Year. Darin has been translated into fourteen languages and published in nineteen countries. He is a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU's creative writing program. www.darinstrauss.com

 

Dennis Loy Johnson is the co-founder of Melville House, one of America's leading independent publishers and a pioneer in the publication of novellas as stand-alone volumes. Hailed by critics, the company's Art of the Novella series, which features works by classic authors such as Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Woolf, and its Contemporary Art of the Novella series, championing modern writers such as Imre Kertesz, Lore Segal and Alejandro Zambra, can be found in bookstores around the world. www.mhpbooks.com/bookseries.php?

 

 

The Paris Literary Prize Committee extends a special thanks to:

Fatema Ahmed, Jemma Birrell, Haejin Chun, Eleanor Coleman, Thomas Collard, Terry Craven, David Delannet, Jeff Dombrowski, Hilary Drummond, Linda Fallon, Lauren Goldenberg, Alex Harwood, Violette Hini, Tara Mulholland, Jessica Murphy, Virginie-Alvine Perrette, Camille Racine, Lindsey Yankey, Zahia Zebboudj, the Société des Gens de Lettres, The New York Review of Books, the Shakespeare and Company friends and tumbleweeds (Art, Brit, Cleo, Colette, Driva, Emily, Hong, Kelsey, Lisa, Lorenza, Manon, Maria, Miki, Sara, Sarah, Sequoya, Sydney, Zach), and all the universities, writing workshops, publications and organizations that helped advertise the prize.