Munro, Longley take Griffin poetry prizes
Jane Munro has been named the Canadian winner of the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize while Michael Longley took the International prize, it was announced at a gala in Toronto’s Distillery District Thursday. They will each receive $65,000 in this, the award’s 15th anniversary year.
They were chosen from a shortlist of three Canadian poets and four international poets and, in the case of two of them, their translators.
Caribbean poet and playwright Derek Walcott received the Lifetime Recognition Award. He did not attend the event due to illness. Deborah Dundas
Duggar interview scores big ratings
Fox News Channel’s Megyn Kelly reached 3.1 million viewers for the first part of her interview with TLC’s Duggar family about their son’s sexual misconduct, her largest audience of the year.
The parents, who star in TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting, acknowledged their son Josh fondled five girls, including four of his sisters, about a dozen years ago. Their reality show has been put on hold by TLC since reports of Josh Duggar’s behaviour surfaced two weeks ago and the network would not comment Thursday on the Duggar interview.
Kelly will air the second part of her interview, with two of the sisters who were Josh’s victims, on Friday. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, talked about how Josh, now 27, came to them at age 14 and tearfully told them that he had “improperly touched” some of their daughters.
Still, they insisted their son is not and was not a pedophile, because he was too young at the time of his offences. Josh was never charged.
Show creator defends rape in Thrones
Last month, Game of Thrones faced a backlash after another Westeros sex- ual assault became a plot point.
Now, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Thrones creator
George R.R. Martin has tried to explain his penchant for personal violation as narrative.
“I want to portray struggle,” he said. “Drama comes out of conflict. If you portray a utopia, then you probably wrote a pretty boring book.”
Though Westeros is not a real place, Martin said, his creation is based on the patriarchal society of the Middle Ages. Westeros is at war and pretending war doesn’t bring rape is “fundamentally dishonest,” he said.
“I have millions of women readers who love the books, who come up to me and tell me they love the female characters,” he said.
“To be non-sexist, does that mean you need to portray an egalitarian society? That’s not in our history; it’s something for science fiction.” The Washington Post
Christian Grey had his say before
The new EL James book Grey shot to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list ahead of its June 18 release on the promise it will flip the perspective of Fifty Shades story from innocent Anastasia Steele to kinky Christian Grey.
But her hordes of fans may not realize it’s not the first time James has explored her massively popular trilogy from Christian’s point of view.
The new book, due out on Christian’s birthday, began like the previous three novels, as Twilight fan fiction using Stephenie Meyer’s original characters, hot vampire Edward Cullen and clumsy innocent Isabella Swan. James wrote about 50 pages as an “outtake” from Edward’s point of view for a fundraiser that benefited a charity in 2010 as she toiled in the FanFiction.net Twilight community of writers under the pen name Snowqueens Icedragon.
“Some material in the book is drawn from that previous work,” acknowledged Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
It’s unclear whether Grey will extend the Fifty Shades story beyond the three published books or cover old ground from the new first-person approach.