Best Selling Novelist Belva Plain Dies at 95

Novelist Belva Plain, author of more than 20 books, has died. Plain was popular for her epic novels of family and forgiveness. She never owned a computer and wrote in longhand on a yellow pad. A disciplined worker, she wrote for several hours in the morning five days a week. She produced a 500- or 600-page novel every year or so. She became a best selling novelist at the age of 59. Her first novel Evergreen was published in 1978. It follows Anna, a feisty, redheaded Jewish immigrant girl from Poland in turn-of-the-century New York, whose family story continues through several decades. Plain's final novel, Heartwood, extends the saga. Heartwood will be published in February 2011. Almost 30 million copies of her books are in print, and they have been translated into 22 languages. Twenty of the novels have appeared on The New York Times best-seller list.

Man Booker Prize Announced

Howard Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for The Finkler Question. Announcing the winner, Andrew Motion said that Jacobson's novel
"is a marvellous book: very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle. It is all that it seems to be and much more than it seems to be. A completely worthy winner of this great prize. Jacobson stated"I have been wanting to win the Booker prize from the start. I don't think I'm alone in that, it's such a fantastic prize. It was beginning to look like I was the novelist that never ever won the Booker prize. I have been increasingly talked about as underrated and I'm so sick of being described as the underrated Howard Jacobson. So the thought that's gone forever, is wonderful."
This year's Man Booker Prize shortlist also included Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey, Room by Emma Donoghue, In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut, The Long Song by Andrea Levy and C by Tom McCarthy.

Mario Vargas Llosa Wins Nobel Prize

Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the most acclaimed writers in the Spanish-speaking world who once ran for president in his homeland, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday. The Swedish Academy said it honored the 74-year-old author "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt and defeat." Vargas Llosa has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays, including Conversation in the Cathedral and The Green House. In 1995, he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor. His international breakthrough came with the 1960s novel The Time of The Hero, which builds on his experiences from the Peruvian military academy Leoncio Prado. The book was considered controversial in his homeland and a thousand copies were burnt publicly by officers from the academy.
Vargas Llosa is the first South American winner of the prestigious 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) Nobel Prize in literature since it was awarded to Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1982.

Popular Writer Stephen Cannell Dies

Prolific writer and Emmy award winner Stephen Cannell has died of cancer at the age of 69. The California native broke into television by writing scripts for It Takes a Thief, Ironside and Adam 12. Cannell went on to create his own production company which released a string of top rated programs, including Rockford Files,A-team., and 21 Jump Street. At the end of his shows, you would see him tear a sheet out which would then float into an animation making the letter C. In recent years, he focused his attention on writing books. His 16th novel, The Prostitute's Ball, will be released this month. "I never thought of myself as being a brilliant writer, and still don't," he told the Associated Press.