Names and faces
Singer-songwriter Lori McKenna now has a Grammy trophy sitting on her piano at her home in Massachusetts, thanks to Little Big Town’s hit song “Girl Crush,” but her five kids still don’t think that makes her cool. “They are impossible to impress,” the 47-yearold McKenna said with a laugh during a recent interview in Nashville, Tenn. “But thank God for them, because I would get too much into it and take myself too seriously. If someone wasn’t asking me when dinner was, I think I would be in trouble.” Over her career, which spans back into the late ’90s, she’s written songs for Faith Hill, Alison Krauss, Reba McEntire, Keith Urban and Hunter Hayes in her basement just outside Boston, between loads of laundry and cooking. But recently she’s been on a successful streak, winning a Grammy this year for best country song for co-writing “Girl Crush” with Liz Rose and Hillary Lindsey. “When you get a Grammy, you’re supposed to drink champagne out of it,” McKenna said. “We were kidding at my house, like we should really eat mac and cheese out of this.” On Friday, she will release her tenth album, The Bird & the Rifle, which includes her version of “Humble & Kind,” a No. 1 hit for country star Tim McGraw that has spawned a music video collaboration with Oprah Winfrey and even a book that was released this year. McKenna said her children are really proud of that song because it’s all about them. And she manages to impart advice to her children, such as don’t lie, don’t cheat and don’t steal, without sounding preachy. “I just wrote it one day when the kids were at school, and I literally was thinking about, ‘Have we told them everything we want to tell them?’” she said.
South African novelist J.M. Coetzee and U.S. Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout are among the contenders announced Wednesday for Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction. Coetzee’s The Schooldays of Jesus and Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton are among the bestknown titles on a 13-book list that spurned big-name writers including Ian McEwan and Don DeLillo in favor of less famous authors and first-time novelists. Coetzee, who lives in Australia, is the early bookies’ favorite and will become the first triple Booker winner if he takes the prize. He won in 1983 with Life and Times of Michael K and in 1999 with Disgrace. Strout won the fiction Pulitzer in 2009 for Olive Kitteridge, which was turned into a HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand. The eclectic Booker list features four first novels — David Means’ Hystpoia, Wyl Menmuir’s The Many, Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen and Virginia Reeves’ Work Like Any Other — alongside established authors such as A.K. Kennedy for Serious Sweet and Deborah Levy for Hot Milk. There’s also a rare nomination for a crime thriller, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project.