The news of Nam Le's winning of the Dylan Thomas Prize with his beautiful "The Boat", reaches us via the Story Prize Blog.

Peter Florence, said Le's work “demonstrated a rare brilliance that is breathtaking both in the scope of its subject matter and the quality of its writing”.

The Dylan Thomas Prize is "the largest literary prize for a writer under the age of 30." Le is 29. 

Nam Le, who was featured in Titlepage's episode 5, received £60,000 and in doing so, beat, among others, another Titlepage guest, Ceridwen Dovey. 

What a treat! Jessica Portner, reporter extra-ordinaire, represented Titlepage at the Book Expo on Friday.

In the process, she collected a few posts that you can now read in Loud Please! This is quite special not only because Jess is an old friend of the team, but also even though she is on the verge of officially becoming a blogger -- she did it here, first!

A former staff writer for the San Jose Mercury News, Jessica has been published in The Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and Slate.com and she is about to launch a blog for the Science Channel called What in the Universe? We hope you visit her there.

In the vast expanse of the Los Angeles Convention Center, one feature stands out: bags, bags, and more bags. Book Expo America will run until June 1st and the more than 25,000 visitors look like overzealous students happily loading up their backpacks and totes.

The question of “to blog or not to blog” seems to weigh heavily on the minds of authors at many Book Expo sessions that have web savvy panelists. This was most evident at the panel titled "Authors and Their Online Communities: the Perils, the Opportunities and What’s Next". During the discussion with pre-eminent author-bloggers such as Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos, Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi, an author in the audience asked “What does it take to blog? It’s so exhausting!”

Some may have noticed that a couple of weeks ago, we added a twitter link in the connect box on the front page of titlepage.tv...yes that little blue "t"....

For those who don't know about Twitter, twittering, tweets etc. it has been called "micro blogging". Practically it is like text messaging to -- the world. Strangely, you start sharing strangers lives as they update you on their lives -- at times by the minute. It is also a great way to rapidly let people know about an event, an article, or to ask for advice and get instant response.

In our case, the first line of our blog posts now automatically appear in twitter, as do our videos when they are uploaded to our Viddler account.

You can also keep up with the latest news this way. You can subscribe (follow in Twitter lingo) to CNN twitters, or the New York Times'. Their tweets will land on your phone screen in no time.

As our foreign- born authors in episode 5 struggle with the idea that they may have to take on the burden of becoming the official representatives of their countries -- and their culture, The US has launched a campaign to encourage reading of American literature -- here in the US and abroad.

As Lindesay Irvine reports in TheGuardian.com, "The Big Read Egypt/US will involve reciprocal promotions of three celebrated American writers in Egypt, and just the one Egyptian writer in the States. Naguib Mahfouz's The Thief and the Dogs will be America's reading book, while Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath will be the focus of reading groups and other events in Cairo and Alexandria."

If you're interested we are adding David Kipen's blog -- the NEA's director of literature -- in our blogroll.