The Words Finesse

Donald Hall, a prolific and award-winning poet and man of letters who was widely admired for his sharp humor and painful candor about nature, mortality, baseball and the distant past, has died at the age of 89, the Guardian reports. 

Hall’s daughter, Philippa Smith, confirmed on Sunday that her father died on Saturday at his home in Wilmot, New Hampshire , after being in hospice care for some time.

“He [was] really quite amazingly versatile,” said Hall’s friend Mike Pride, editor emeritus of the Concord Monitor newspaper and a retired administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, adding that Hall would occasionally speak to reporters at the Monitor about the importance of words.

Hall was US poet laureate in 2006 and 2007. Starting in the 1950s, he published more than 50 books, from poetry and drama to biography and memoirs, and edited a pair of influential anthologies. He was a baseball fan who wrote odes to his beloved Boston Red Sox, completed a book on pitcher Dock Ellis and contributed to Sports Illustrated. He wrote a prize-winning children’s book, Ox-Cart Man, and attempted a biography of Charles Laughton, only to have the actor’s widow, Elsa Lancaster, kill the project.

The greatest acclaim came for his poetry, for which honors included a National Book Critics Circle prize, membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a National Medal of Arts. Although his style varied from haiku to blank verse, Hall returned repeatedly to a handful of themes: his childhood, the death of his parents and grandparents and the loss of his second wife and fellow poet, Jane Kenyon.

“Much of my poetry has been elegiac, even morbid, beginning with laments over New Hampshire farms and extending to the death of my wife,” he wrote in a memoir, Packing the Boxes, published in 2008.

He at times resembled a 19th-century rustic, with untrimmed beard and ragged hair. His work reached back to timeless images of his beloved home, Eagle Pond Farm, built in 1803 and belonging to his family since the 1860s. He kept country hours for much of his working life, rising at 6am and writing for two hours.

For Hall, the industrialized world often seemed an intrusion, such as a neon sign along a dirt road. In the tradition of TS Eliot and other modernists, he juxtaposed classical and historical references with contemporary slang and brand names. An opponent of the Vietnam war, he was ruthlessly self-critical. Nakedly, even abjectly, he recorded his failures and shortcomings and disappointments, whether his infidelities or his struggles with alcoholism.

The joy and tragedy of his life were his years with Kenyon, his second wife. They met in 1969, when she was his student at the University of Michigan. By the mid-70s they were married and living at Eagle Creek.

“We sleep, we make love, we plant a tree, we walk up and down/eating lunch,” he wrote.

But Kenyon was diagnosed with leukemia and died in 1995, when she was 47. Hall never stopped mourning her and arranged to be buried next to her, beneath a headstone inscribed with lines from one of her poems: “I BELIEVE IN THE MIRACLES OF ART, BUT WHAT PRODIGY WILL KEEP YOU BESIDE ME?”

In the 1998 collection Without, and in many poems after, Hall reflected on her dying days, on the shock of outliving a woman so many years younger, and the lasting bewilderment of their dog Gus, who years later was still looking for her.

Hall was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928, but favored Eagle Pond over the “blocks of six-room houses” back home. By 14 he had decided to become a poet.

He published poetry while at Phillips Exeter Academy and formed lasting literary friendships at Harvard, including with fellow poets Robert Bly and Adrienne Rich and with George Plimpton, for whom he was the first poetry editor at the Paris Review. He met Daniel Ellsberg and would suspect well before others that the leaker of the Vietnam war documents known as the Pentagon Papers was his college friend.

Hall studied at Oxford and became one of the few Americans to win the Newdigate Prize, an honor given to Oscar Wilde, John Ruskin and others. He returned to the US in the mid-1950s and taught at schools including Stanford and Bennington. He was married to Kirby Thompson from 1952 to 1969, and they had two children.

Hall’s first literary hero was Edgar Allan Poe and death was an early subject. In recent years, as Hall entered the “planet of antiquity”, many of his elegies were for himself.

Salamatu Sule is an author, African literature reviewer and a former Secretary of the Abuja Chapter of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA). She speaks in this interview with ABDULHAFEEZ T. OYEWOLE on her children's book “Oma: The Drummer Queen”, her upcoming works  and other sundry issues.

A fast rising Nigerian writer and publisher, Kukhogo Iruesiri Samson,  fondly called KIS, has won the maiden edition of the Guaranty Trust Bank (GT Bank) Dusty Manuscript Contest. 

Samson won the cash prize of a million naira and a publishing contract with one of the Nigeria's finest publishing outfit, Farafina Books with his nine years old manuscript titled "Devil's Pawn".

Announcing his win in a series of post on Instagram yesterday's evening, KIS wrote:

"I want to thank all of you who supported my writing over the years. I am pleased to announce that I have won the 2018 Dusty Manuscript Contest - 1 million naira cash prize and a publishing contract with Farafina Books..."

His manuscript triumphed out of the over a thousand submissions and the carefully selected Top 20 entries later shortlisted a week ago, based on originality, language, grammar, narrative strength, coherence and dramatic intensity.

Throughout the selection process, the Judges which include renowned authors Eghosa Imasuen, Yejide Kilanko and Toni Kan, as well as an Assistant Professor of English Dr. Ainehi Edoro-Glines, were not made aware of the identities of contestants. 

Finalising on a blind review process that led to the winning of KIS's "Devil's Pawn", the Contest Judges have this to say:

“The winning entry was a unanimous choice…The story is the best example of the possibilities inherent in genre fiction switching from crime to adventure, thriller to horror. Told in a fast paced narrative style that keeps you glued to the pages, our winning entry is a gift that keeps on giving.”

Recall that Devil's Pawn was shortlisted and became the 1st Runner Up in the ANA's 2017 Prose Prize.

Before its shortlist last year for ANA Prize, Samson had episodised the draft on Pulse.ng some years back.

Organized in partnership with publishing houses: Okadabooks and Farafina, The Dusty Manuscript Contest is part of GTBank’s YouREAD initiative, which is aimed at promoting the culture of reading and inspiring the next generation of award-winning and globally renowned authors.

Congratulations on a well deserved win.

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has won this year's PEN Pinter Prize.

Named in memory of playwright Harold Pinter, the prize celebrates his respect for British and Commonwealth writers who take an "unflinching, unswerving" look at the world.

The judges praised Adichie's "sophisticated" approach to "gender, race and global inequality".

The Half of a Yellow Sun author described the award as an "honour".

"I admired Harold Pinter's talent, his courage, his lucid dedication to telling his truth," she said.

Adichie will receive the award - established by literary charity English PEN - at a ceremony at the British Library in October, where she will deliver an address.

This will include announcing the writer named this year's International Writer of Courage, reflecting English PEN's support for freedom of expression in the face of danger.

A limited edition anthology of 10 Pinter Prize lectures will be printed to celebrate the prize's 10th anniversary.

Adichie's debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2003. It was followed three years later by Orange Prize winner Half of a Yellow Sun.

An outspoken feminist, she delivered two hotly debated Ted talks that were published as a book titled Why We Should All Be Feminists in 2014.

Lady Antonia Fraser, Harold Pinter's widow, said she greeted the award of the prize with enthusiasm.

"Not only is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie a brilliant, compelling writer but she embodies in herself those qualities of courage and outspokenness which Harold much admired," she said.

Antonia Byatt, director of English PEN, said Adichie's writing and activism had "travelled across so many frontiers, showing us what is important in the world".

"She is a very worthy winner of this extraordinary prize."

The PEN Pinter Prize is awarded annually to a writer from Britain, Ireland or the Commonwealth.

Recent recipients include Margaret Atwood, Sir Salman Rushdie and the poet James Fenton.

After spending several weeks to go through over more than 1000 stories submitted for the Dusty Manuscript Contest, the judges of the competition have selected their top 20 entries.