News/Early Summer
Pulitzer
caps spectacular prize season for Agency authors!
FAINARU TAKES TWO MAJOR AWARDS
Agency author Steve Fainaru has won this year's Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, and, just two weeks later, added the 2008 Hal Boyle Award from the Overseas Press Club of America to his accolades. The two prizes are considered the most prestigious awarded annually for reporting from abroad.
The veteran Washington Post reporter was cited at the April 7 Pulitzer ceremony for his "heavily reported series series on private security contractors in Iraq that operate outside most of the laws governing American forces." The security contractors are also the subject of Steve's forthcoming book BIG BOY RULES, which will be published by Da Capo Press this fall. Steve was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2006, and previously won the Associated Press Sports Editors award four times. His prize was one of six Pulitzers awarded to the Post this year.
In its citation accompanying the Boyle Award, the Overseas Press Club cited Steve's Washington Post series "The Private Armies of Iraq" as "a groundbreaking expose of private security firms in Iraq, written months before the Blackwater scandal found guards from one of the largest security firms opening fire on Iraqi civilians. In a deeply reported, riveting narrative, Fainaru shines a penetrating light on a murky world. The OPC salutes the achievement of a single reporter tackling one of the most important stories of the year."
KRISTEN LAINE TAKES PEN/WINSHIP
Nor was Fainaru alone among the prizewinners this season. In a John F. Kennedy Library ceremony on March 30, Kristen Laine won the 2008 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for her masterful AMERICAN BAND, published in hardcover last year and coming in paperback this fall, both from Gotham Books. The Winship award celebrates authors from New England or who write on New England themes.
Robert Shepard said, "As if I weren't immensely proud of the Agency's authors already, Steve's and Kristen's prizes remind me again of the exceptional talent and quality--really all out of proportion to the Agency's size--that is gathered on this list. I couldn't be happier for them or for the Agency family. Knowing how dedicated my authors are to the craft, it's really gratifying to see them celebrated by their peers in this way."
"Steve's prize also confirms," Shepard added, "the extraordinary journalistic standards set by the Washington Post, which stands nearly unparalleled in delivering accurate and incisive reporting at a time when American newspapers seem almost under siege. It's a special point of pride for this former Washingtonian to represent two Post reporters--both of them now Pulitzer Prize winners."
OTHER ROBERT E. SHEPARD AGENCY WINNERS
Steve Fainaru's Washington Post colleague Anthony Shadid won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and is the author of LEGACY OF THE PROPHET (Westview) and NIGHT DRAWS NEAR (Holt), as well as a forthcoming book on Lebanon for Houghton Mifflin. NIGHT DRAWS NEAR won the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. But the two are not the only award winners on the Agency's list by any stretch. Brian Murphy, author of THE NEW MEN (Putnam) and THE ROOT OF WILD MADDER (Simon & Schuster), is a past winner of the Associated Press Managing Editors Award, and was part of a team that contributed to the AP's prizewinning 1995 reporting from Rwanda. Don Kladstrup, co-author with his wife, Petie, of the bestselling WINE & WAR (Broadway) and of CHAMPAGNE (Wm. Morrow) has won three Emmy Awards; his ABC documentaries about apartheid and about modern slavery won the prestigious Alfred I. duPont Columbia Award in 1995 and 1996, respectively, and he is also the winner of the coveted Robert F. Kennedy Award, four Overseas Press Club Awards, and others. John Wasik, most recently author of THE MERCHANT OF POWER (Palgrave), has won (among many others) the Donald Robinson Award for Investigative Reporting from the American Society of Journalists and Authors and the National Press Club Award for Consumer Reporting.
And there are many more. Congratulations!
Out and
about
Robert Shepard attended the annual Book Expo America convention, the U.S. publishing industry's largest, in Los Angeles May 30 through June 1. Highlights of the convention included a signing by Agency author Steve Fainaru; other clients attending this year included John Scalzi and Lucy Jo Palladino, Ph.D. . . Robert will again serve on the faculty of the Willamette Writers Conference in Portland, OR, this August, where he will teach his popular "What I Look for in a Non-Fiction Book Proposal" seminar. He also served on the faculty of the San Francisco Writers Conference, which was held February 15 to 17, 2008 at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco. Robert heard author "pitches" and moderated a panel on writing bestselling non-fiction books, joined by Walker Books Publisher George Gibson and Touchstone-Fireside Senior Editor Michelle Howry . . . Robert was quoted in the June issue of industry newsletter Publishing Trends, in an article about California's thriving community of literary agents. Quipping that New York editors "need to get out more," he also spoke of the centrality of books to the cultural life of the San Francisco Bay Area, one reason for its robust and mutually supportive community of authors, agents, and editors.