newsmakers

newsmakers

Funeral next week for Robin Gibb

LONDON

A private funeral for Bee Gees star Robin Gibb will take place next week, with a public memorial service planned for later in the year.

In a statement issued Wednesday on behalf of Gibb’s family, his relatives confirmed that a service for “close family and friends” would take place June 8.

No details about the location of the funeral have been disclosed.

The Gibb family requested that mourners offer donations, rather than flowers, to two children’s charities on the Isle of Man, where Gibb was born.

Gibb, a founder of the Bee Gees with two of his brothers, died May 20 after a long battle with cancer at age 62.

Plans have not yet been confirmed for a public memorial service.

Children’s book illustrator Dillon dies

NEW YORK

Leo Dillon, the groundbreaking illustrator who became the first African-American to win the Caldecott Medal for children’s books, has died in New York at 79.

Publisher Scholastic Inc. announced Wednesday that Dillon died Saturday at Long Island College Hospital from complications after lung surgery.

Dillon and his wife and fellow illustrator, Diane Dillon, collaborated on a wide range of children’s projects that helped introduce kids of all races to stories of black people worldwide. They won the Caldecott for best illustration in 1976 for “Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears: A West African Folktale.” They won a Caldecott the following year for “Ashanti to Zulu: African Traditions.”

The interracial couple worked on more than 40 books together.

A new work, “If Kids Ran the World,” is scheduled for 2014.

Madeleine Miller wins fiction prize

LONDON

American Madeleine Miller has won the prestigious Orange Prize for fiction for her debut novel, “The Song of Achilles.”

Joanna Trollope, who chaired the judging panel, described Miller’s retelling of the ancient Greek myth as “inventive, passionate, uplifting and different” in the central London awards ceremony Wednesday.

Two other Americans had joined Miller, a classics teacher turned novelist, on the six-book shortlist for the prize: Cynthia Ozick for “Foreign Bodies” and Ann Patchett for “State of Wonder.”

Also on the shortlist were “The Forgotten Waltz” by Ireland’s Anne Enright, “Painter of Silence” by British writer Georgina Harding and “Half Blood Blues,” a Booker Prize finalist by Canada’s Esi Edugyan.

The $48,000 prize is open to any novel by a woman published in English.

Vindicator wire services