Sue will present the 2006 Quill Award for General Fiction during the award ceremonies in New York. The program will air October 28 on most NBC television stations.

At the beginning of her career, and for a little over a decade, Sue Monk Kidd wrote and compiled a significant body of inspirational and spiritual work comprised of personal stories, reflections, meditations and essays that were originally published in Guideposts Magazine and, to a lesser extent, in other publications, such as Weavings. These pieces have been more or less lost beneath the layer of years; however a new book to be published October, 10 2006 by Guideposts Books will make the majority of Sue’s early work available. Titled Firstlight, Early Inspirational Writings, the book offers readers an intimate glimpse into the author’s formative years as a spiritual seeker, writer, mother, wife and daughter. The content is organized around thirteen motifs: The Crucible of Story, Awareness, Availability, Compassion, Solitude, The Sacred Ordinary, Simplicity of Spirit, Gracious Space, Severe Grace, A Taste of Silence, Standing Fast, Letting Go, Reborn to Love. Click here for more information on Amazon.com.

Academy Award-winning actress, Kim Basinger (L.A. Confidential, The Sentinel) will make her television movie debut as Jessie Sullivan in the movie adaptation of Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, The Mermaid Chair. The director is Emmy Award winner Stephen Schachter. Principal filming begins May 8. The movie will air on Lifetime Television in September.

The April 14th 2006 issue of Entertainment Weekly reports the five longest running novels since 1980 on Publisher’s Weekly best-seller list. The Secret Life of Bees comes in #5, having logged 145 weeks on the list. The rest of the top five are (in order) The Bridges of Madison County, The Da Vinci Code, The Notebook, and Angels & Demons. Click here to view the article.

Two weeks after its paperback publication, The Mermaid Chair is #1 on Book Sense, #1 on the Washington Post, #2 on USA Today, and #5 on the New York Times best seller list.

Sue has signed a contract with Riverhead Books for a new spiritual memoir to be cowritten with her thirty year old daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor. They describe the book, which is yet to be titled, as a ‘mother-daughter, spiritual, travel memoir.’ It will tell the story of a series of pilgrimages that Sue and Ann made together through Greece, France, Turkey, and Switzerland, which began when Ann graduated from college and Sue turned fifty. The journeys turned out to be powerful initiations. Ann was looking for a way to cross into young womanhood and Sue was seeking a way into older womanhood. The book will chronicle these passages and also capture the metamorphosis of their own mother-daughter relationship.

Both The Mermaid Chair and The Secret Life of Bees were among the top three longest-running bestsellers at Publisher’s Weekly in 2005. Mermaid was # 3 in hardcover fiction with 24 weeks on the bestseller list and Bees was #2 in trade paperback fiction at 48 weeks on the list.

The Southeastern Library Association (SELA) has chosen The Secret Life of Bees as their Fiction Award winner for 2005 . The award will be presented at the organization’s biennial conference April 6 , 2006.

Sue spoke before an audience of more than 800 at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. on the Black Madonna in The Secret Life of Bees. Watch the video here.

Sue Monk Kidd received the Quill Award for her novel The Mermaid Chair at an award ceremony in New York, October 11, 2005. The award was presented to Sue by novelist Erica Jong. The ceremony, televised as a one hour special on NBC October 22, included award presentations to authors in nineteen categories. The Mermaid Chair won in the category of General Fiction. The other nominees for General Fiction were, The Plot Against America by Philip Roth; Zorro by Isabel Allende; Gilead by Marilynne Robinson; A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. Books were nominated by a national panel of 6000 invited librarians and booksellers, who sought the best books published between August 1, 2004 and July 31, 2005. The winner was then decided by the reading public who voted online and through bookstores, making the Quill Award the first literary award to contain a “people’s choice” element. For a full list of winners: www.quillsliteracy.org.