Our next year’s president Sylvie Patron and first vice-president Lindsay Holmgren will collaborate with me on preparing a list of nominees, drawing on your recommendations. From this list, the ISSN Executive Council will identify three finalists. Past winners of the Booth Award and past presidents of the ISSN will then select an honoree from among these three.

The Society gave its first Lifetime Achievement Award to Wayne C. Booth in 2006. Subsequent honorees have been: Gérard Genette, Susan Stanford Friedman, Dorrit Cohn, Seymour Chatman, Gerald Prince, Hayden White, Tzvetan Todorov, Lubomir Doležel, Marie-Laure Ryan, Mieke Bal, Slomith Rimmon-Kenan and Susan Lanser. The 2021 Award will be formally presented at the ISSN Conference in Chichester, England, June 16–19, 2021.

You will find more information about the award at:
http://narrative.georgetown.edu/awards/booth.php

Thank you for helping us to identify outstanding candidates for the 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award.

On behalf of the nominating committee,

Maria Mäkelä, 2019 President of ISSN

https://instrumentalnarratives.wordpress.com/…/marie-laure…/

The next contribution will be by Peter Lamarque; we aim to publish one blog entry every month. What we’d like to do now is to invite all narrative colleagues across disciplines to send us very short, informal proposals for possible blog entries!

Please send your proposals to samuli.bjorninen@tuni.fi

Here’s a very short description of the blog’s general idea, and below a link to more detailed blog guidelines:

Everyone is urged to share their story today, from consumers to multinational corporations, from private citizens to nation states. Storytelling consultants are thriving in today’s storytelling economy, but where are narrative scholars? Do the professional analyzers and theorizers of narrative have a say in the current storytelling boom? The blog aims to popularize the insight and methods of narrative scholarship and features analyses of instrumental storytelling by high-profile narrative scholars.
Concept: The analyzed case – preferably just one – can deal with uses or abuses of the narrative form, storytelling practices or narrative sense-making in any area of life: politics, journalism, business, identity work, artistic/literary sphere, activism, forms of social participation. We encourage our contributors to evaluate possible societal risks or benefits of the type of instrumental storytelling analyzed, while paying special attention to the use of the narrative form in the chosen example. More general reflections on the storytelling boom, its causes and effects, are welcome as far as they support the analysis of the selected case.
Blog Guidelines https://instrumentalnarratives.wordpress.com/blog-guidelin…/

With my best regards, on behalf of the Instrumental Narratives consortium team,
Maria Mäkelä

Dr. Maria Mäkelä
Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature
Director of Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies
President, International Society for the Study of Narrative
Tampere University, Finland

Members of the Executive Council:
Helen Davis, Wilkes University
Aaron Oforlea, Washington State University

Please join me in congratulating them!

Please also join me in thanking the other candidates, whose willingness to serve is a great sign of the Society’s strength: Alison Gibbons, Sheffield Hallam University, Eva von Contzen, University of Freiburg, and Roy Sommer, University of Wuppertal.

I also want to thank the nominations committee for bringing the membership this excellent slate of candidates: Sylvie Patron, Irene Kacandes, Jonathan Culler, and Henrik Skov Nielsen.

Thanks, too, to Eddie Maloney, who did his usual bang-up job in overseeing the election process.

Thanks,
Jim Phelan