Time to congratulate Minnesotans VV Ganeshananthan and Jim Perlman, who have won separate awards. Jim Perlman (Anna Min / Min Enterprises Photography) Perlman, founder/publisher of Holy Cow! Press in Duluth, received a Lifetime Achievement award from Community of Literary Magazines and Presses for his years of publishing quality books. The award was announced as part of CLMP’s annual Firecracker Awards virtual ceremony.
Perlman founded Holy Cow in 1977 in Minneapolis and has acquired and mostly edited more than 125 books of poetry, short fiction, novels, biography, memoir and anthologies, with an emphasis on Midwest and Native American writers. Perlman, who holds a master’s degree from the University of Iowa, moved the press several times, from Iowa and Wisconsin, before settling in Duluth in 1988. His first publication was “Letters to Tomasito,” a chapbook of poems by Thomas McGrath about his son.
VV Ganeshananthan won the Women’s prize for fiction for her novel “Brotherless Night.” The prize, now in its 29th year, describes itself as “the greatest celebration of female creativity in the world.” It began in 1995 in the wake of an all-male Booker Prize shortlist in 1991 and is administered by the Women’s Prize Trust.
The story, set mostly during the Sri Lankan civil war, is about a girl who dreams of becoming a doctor before war breaks out in her country and those around her begin to engage with violent political ideologies. The judges called the novel “.
