Petra Mayer
Petra Mayer died on November 13, 2021. She has been remembered by friends and colleagues, including all of us at NPR. The Petra Mayer Memorial Fund for Internships has been created in her honor.
Petra Mayer (she/her) was an editor (and the resident nerd) at NPR Books, focusing on fiction, and particularly genre fiction. She brought to the job passion, speed-reading skills, and a truly impressive collection of Doctor Who doodads. You could also hear her on the air and on the occasional episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour.
Prior to her role at NPR Books, she was an associate producer and director for All Things Considered on the weekends. She handled all of the show's books coverage, and she was also the person to ask if you wanted to know how much snow falls outside NPR's Washington headquarters on a Saturday, how to belly dance, or what pro wrestling looks like up close and personal.
Mayer originally came to NPR as an engineering assistant in 1994, while still attending Amherst College. After three years spending summers honing her soldering skills in the maintenance shop, she made the jump to Boston's WBUR as a newswriter in 1997. Mayer returned to NPR in 2000 after a roundabout journey that included a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University and a two-year stint as an audio archivist and producer at the Prague headquarters of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. She still knows how to solder.
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The Swedish Academy — the body that awards Nobel Prizes — has announced that the literature prize will not be given this year. The decision follows a spate of infighting and allegations of sexual misconduct against the husband of an Academy member.
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Author Ursula K. Le Guin has died at age 88. She was a prolific writer of science fiction and fantasy who brought feminism into her work and raised the genres into literature.
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NPR Books editor Petra Mayer was in the Manhattan neighborhood on Saturday when she saw what looked like a pressure cooker on the sidewalk. Suddenly she found herself at the heart of the night's news.
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The latest book in J.K. Rowling's series, really a script for a play, "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child," went on sale at midnight. We check in with fans who lined up, wands in hand, to get a copy.
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Peter Rabbit — older and stouter — returns this fall in a newly published Beatrix Potter story, The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots. It was probably written just before World War I and then abandoned.
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The PEN/Allen award is given annually to big-name authors who embody the organization's mission "to oppose repression in any form." Rowling is a frequent target — and vocal opponent — of censorship.
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Matt de la Peña becomes the first Hispanic author to win the Newbery award for children's literature, while the Caldecott picture-book prize went to a book about the real-life Winnie the Pooh.
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We get hundreds of books in the mail every week, and some always fall through the cracks. NPR's Petra Mayer singles out a biography of a Sikh princess turned suffragette for a second look.
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James is the first Jamaican author to win the prestigious literary award, for his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings. It's based on a real 1976 assassination attempt on reggae star Bob Marley.
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The "sad puppies" — a group of disgruntled, mostly white male science fiction authors — struck out at the Hugo Awards over the weekend after trying to stuff the ballot box.
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The prestigious Hugo Awards, which honor science fiction and fantasy writing, will be held Saturday. Lately, they have been given to more and more women and writers of color as the world of sci-fi opens up — and that's prompted a backlash from a group of mostly white male writers who call themselves the "Sad Puppies."
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Tender, smoky, fall-off-the-bone ribs can take three or four hours to make the traditional way. But Baltimore chef Shirlé Koslowski uses a pressure cooker to get all that flavor in only an hour.