Awards and articles from Curiousworld

What our favorite authors have been up to recently.

Author

Bobbie Johnson
May 03, 2026

Since May’s books are still on their way to club members, I thought I’d just take a moment this week to flag up news from around the CLU (that is, the Curious Literary Universe.)

First, huge congratulations to Carvell Wallace [CUR004, Aug 24] who was just named as one of the recipients of the Whiting Award for emerging writers. That is a big deal! And it’s funny to me, since I’ve been addicted to reading Carvell’s work for more than a decade at this point, so thinking of him as an “emerging writer” is wild. But maybe that’s also testament to how long it can take to build a career as an author (and hey, maybe we’re always emerging as writers.) We’re out of stock of his phenomenal and beautiful memoir, Another Word For Love, but you can get it through Bookshop or Amazon.  

In fact, we’re heading into book award season more broadly, so nominations and gongs are gearing up. Laura Poppick [CUR016, Aug 25] was one of the finalists for a PEN America prize… and Annalee Newitz [CUR009, Jan 25] has been on a tear with the terrific novella Automatic Noodle, which was rightly nominated for Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. 

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Getting to bylines, meanwhile, and Bonnie Tsui [CUR013, May 25] has been busy! In book club metaness, she wrote about a 30-years-and-still-standing club for Alta magazine. Over at The Atlantic she also wrote a lovely piece trying to answer the question of why so many writers are athletes. (Not all writers!) And in Elle, she talks with Mary Cain, a running prodigy who has written about her career and the need to protect young athletes. 

Elsewhere Henry Grabar [CUR012, Apr 25] took to the pages of The Atlantic looking at a simple solution to people not paying their fares on San Francisco’s BART rail system—new gates. (It has generated more revenue, but the system still faces a huge financial shortfall.)

Craig Mod [CUR022, Feb 26] is a regular contributor to the New York Times, particularly its annual list of places to go, and his pick for this year is Nagasaki. He wrote about why he chose it over at Ridgeline.

Kyle Chayka [CUR008, Dec 24] wrote an interesting piece in his New Yorker column on OpenAI’s desire to “de-escalate” the conversation on AI: “The messaging behind A.I. companies has always relied on a self-serving paradox: the technology under development is so potentially dangerous that the public’s only choice is to put blind faith in the handful of opaque businesses rapidly developing it.”

And finally, last year we picked the incredible Challenger by Adam Higginbotham [CUR010, Feb 25], but his previous book Midnight in Chernobyl was the topic of an interview with Times Radio on the 40th anniversary of the nuclear disaster. 

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Finally: Are you looking to pick up a previous Curious book club choice? We have some stock remaining on a handful of titles from the last couple of years: You can see them all on our website. Only a very small number of each left!

Copies of Feed the People! should be arriving with folks soon. Next week we’ll take a close look at some of the arguments it puts forward.