Miroslav Penkov

There have been eighteen recipients of the BBC National Short Story Award, an annual short-story contest that is open to residents and nationals of the United Kingdom. It is the richest literary prize in the world for a single short story. Established in 2005 and announced at that year's Edinburgh International Book Festival, the first winner of the award was James Lasdun for An Anxious Man in 2006. At the age of 26, Canadian writer D. W. Wilson became the youngest-ever recipient of the award in 2011. Sarah Hall, who won the award in 2013 and 2020, is the only writer to have won the award twice. In honour of the 2012 Summer Olympics hosted in London, the competition was open to a global audience that year; ten stories were shortlisted instead of five, and Bulgarian writer Miroslav Penkov (pictured) won. The winner of the 2024 award is scheduled to be announced on 12 September. (Full list...)

View of Luhansk

There are 37 populated places officially granted city status in Luhansk Oblast, the easternmost region of Ukraine. Settlements with more than 10,000 people are eligible to become cities, although the status is also typically given by the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, to settlements of historical or regional importance. According to the 2001 Ukrainian census, the most populous city in the oblast was the regional capital Luhansk (pictured), with a population of 463,097, while the least populous city was Almazna, with 5,061. Following the Donbas war in 2014, 25 of the oblast's cities were occupied by pro-Russian separatists. After the enactment of decommunization laws across the country, nine cities in separatist-occupied territory were de jure given new names in 2016 which were unrecognized by pro-Russian officials in the cities. Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian troops have occupied all cities in the oblast since the end of the battle of Lysychansk in 2022. (Full list...)

Brook Benton

In 1961, Billboard magazine launched a chart ranking the top-performing songs in the United States which were considered to be "easy listening". The chart has undergone various name changes and since 1996 has been published under the title Adult Contemporary. Initially, the listing was compiled simply by extracting from the magazine's pop music chart, the Hot 100, those songs which were deemed by the magazine's staff to fit under the Easy Listening banner and ranking them according to their placings on the Hot 100. In 1961, seven different songs topped the Easy Listening chart in 24 issues of the magazine. The number one song on the first Easy Listening chart was "The Boll Weevil Song" by Brook Benton (pictured), which was at number 2 on the Hot 100 that week. The longest-running Easy Listening number one of 1961 was "Big Bad John" by Jimmy Dean, which spent the final ten weeks of the year in the top spot. It was one of three songs to top the Hot 100 as well as the Easy Listening chart during the year, along with "Wooden Heart" by Joe Dowell and "Michael" by the Highwaymen. (Full list...)