No Mystery About Bouchercon 2009’s Excellence

Bouchercon, the 40th World Mystery Convention, is now winding down in Indianapolis, Indiana. Among the very best coverage coming out of Indianapolis this weekend has been from January Magazine’s sister publication, the crime-fiction-dedicated Rap Sheet.

The Rap Sheet team has been delivering amazing coverage from the event including results from the awards handed out there, various news items and even some fantastic interviews. Thanks to the magic of labels, you can see it all here.

Criminal Minds Descend Upon Indy

Bouchercon, the 40th World Mystery Convention, kicked off earlier today in Indianapolis, Indiana. And already it’s producing headlines, mostly in the form of award winners. Our sister site, The Rap Sheet, has a complete rundown of the victors and the vanquished so far. Among the happy crime fictionists this evening are Deborah Crombie (Where Memories Lie), Arnaldur Indridason (The Draining Lake), Tom Rob Smith (Child 44), Julie Hyzy (State of the Onion), and James O. Born (who walked away with the Barry Award for Best Short Story).

On Friday night, during a banquet at The Slippery Noodle bar, the Private Eye Writers of America will hand out its Shamus Awards (nominees here), while the grand announcement of this year’s Anthony Awards is to be made on Saturday afternoon (with a list of the contenders to be found here.)

Stay tuned to The Rap Sheet for further Bouchercon coverage.

Giller Prize Shortlist Announced

In our excitement in reporting on the winner of the 2009 Man Booker Award earlier today, we neglected to report the Giller Awards shortlist, announced even earlier. Quill & Quire sets us straight:

The Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist was announced this morning, and it included a mix of “sure bets” and surprise nods. The biggest surprise, however, was the omission of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (McClelland & Stewart), which was widely considered the frontrunner going into the announcement.

The five shortlisted titles are:

• Kim Echlin, The Disappeared (Penguin Canada)
• Annabel Lyon, The Golden Mean (Random House Canada)
• Linden MacIntyre, The Bishop’s Man (Random House Canada)
• Colin McAdam, Fall (Penguin Canada)
• Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault (McClelland & Stewart)

The Scotiabank Giller Prize is Canada’s richest literary award. The winner will be announced in Toronto at a nationally televised gala on November 10.

Mantel’s Wolf Hall Wins 2009 Man Booker

Hilary Mantel’s historical novel set in 16th-century Britain has won the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate) is the story of Thomas Cromwell’s rise in the Tudor court. The book has also been the bookies’ favorite since the announcement of the Man Booker longlist back in July. The longlist was reduced to a shortlist in September.

The Man Booker Web site points out that this is the first time a book published by Fourth Estate has won the Man Booker, although three of its books have previously been shortlisted: Nicola Barker’s Darkmans in 2007; and two from Carol Shields, Unless in 2002 and The Stone Diaries in 1993.

Here are the other books shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Award:

• The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt (Random House, Chatto and Windus)
• Summertime by J.M. Coetzee (Random House, Harvill Secker)
• The Quickening Maze by Adam Fould (Random House, Jonathan Cape)
• The Glass Room by Simon Mawer (Little, Brown)
• The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (Little, Brown, Virago)

Davidson and Doctorow Take Home 2009 Sunburst Awards

Andrew Davidson and Cory Doctorow emerged victorious from two very tight fields in the 2009 Sunburst Awards.

A prized and juried award presented annually, the Sunburst Award is based on excellence of writing and is awarded annually to a Canadian writer who has published a book-length work of speculative fiction. Named for a novel by the late Phyllis Gotlieb, the Sunburst Award consists of a cash prize of $1000 as well as a hand-crafted medallion incorporating the Sunburst logo designed by Marcel Gagné.

The winner of the 2009 award in the adult category was Andrew Davidson for The Gargoyle (Random House Canada). In the young adult category, it was awarded to Cory Doctorow for Little Brother (Tor).

The other shortlisted works for the 2009 adult award were:


• Night Child by Jes Battis
• The Alchemist’s Code by Dave Duncan
• Things Go Flying by Shari Lapeña
• Half a Crown by Jo Walton

The other shortlisted works for the 2009 young adult award were:


• The Summoning by Kelley Armstrong
• Dingo by Charles de Lint
• Wild Talent: A Novel of the Supernatural by Eileen Kernaghan
• Night Runner by Max Turner

The Best of the Best of the Very, Very Best

What is the very best work of American fiction published during the last 60 years? I could give you three guesses but, according to the National Book foundation, you’d probably be way off base. Of the 78 winners those 60 years represent, six finalists have already been selected. And, honestly? It’s a funny little list:

• The Stories of John Cheever
• Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
• The Collected Stories of William Faulkner
• The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor
• Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
• The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

Still looking to turn their November shindig into a celebration that can be enjoyed by all, the NBF is asking people to help select the finalist of the six. The e-mail address of those who vote will be entered to win two tickets to the 60th National Book Awards celebration in NYC on November 18th, as well as two night in the Marriott Hotel Downtown.

You can cast your vote here. The entire field can be seen here. Once you’ve done that, you might come back and let us know who you would have selected from 60 years of winners.

Man Booker Shortlist Announced

The shortlist for the 2009 Man Booker award was announced in London today. The six books selected, from a longlist of 13, were:

• The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt (Random House, Chatto and Windus)
• Summertime by J.M. Coetzee (Random House, Harvill Secker)
• The Quickening Maze by Adam Fould (Random House, Jonathan Cape)
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (HarperCollins, Fourth Estate)
• The Glass Room by Simon Mawer (Little, Brown)
• The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (Little, Brown, Virago)

“We’re thrilled to be able to announce such a strong shortlist,” said Jim Naughtie, chair of the 2009 judging panel, “so enticing that it will certainly give us a headache when we come to select the winner. The choice will be a difficult one. There is thundering narrative, great inventiveness, poetry and sharp human insight in abundance.”

The Man Booker Prize Web site is here. Meanwhile, yesterday UK publisher Faber and Faber announced that they will be offering readers to win commemorative editions of the shortlisted books here.

So Much for the Gumshoes

I was extremely proud in 2005 when January Magazine’s crime-fiction department--of which I was (and still am) the editor--won the Gumshoe Award for Best Web Site. That was the fourth year in which the Gumshoes were dispensed by the Web site Mystery Ink and its editor, David J. Montgomery. Since 2002, George Pelecanos, Laura Lippman, Henning Mankell, Julia Spencer-Fleming, Robert Crais, and Sarah Weinman have all picked up Gumshoe Awards.

But, after realizing yesterday that there had not yet been an announcement of Gumshoe nominees for 2009, I wrote Montgomery to ask when that might come. His response:

No Gumshoe Awards this year. Given the glut of mystery/thriller awards that now exists, we probably won’t be doing them anymore.

This is too bad. Although there are certainly abundant commendations given out these days to people laboring in the mystery/crime fiction/thriller field, tastes and reading experiences always differ among judges. Reducing the number of prizes will consequently limit the range of books and authors being applauded--and thus promoted to readers. I’d hate to see a day when all of the smaller awards programs disappear, and only the big-name writers receive recognition.

Trillium Prize Winners Named

The $20,000 Trillium Prize has been awarded to Pasha Malla for his debut collection, The Withdrawal Method (House of Anansi). “It’s awesome,” Malla told The National Post, “it’s just weird. I [feel] completely bewildered by it.”

Pasha wins in a very tough field that included Kevin Connolly (Revolver), Helen Humphreys (Coventry), Ibi Kaslik (The Angel Riots), Nino Ricci (The Origin of Species) and Charles Wilkins (In The Lane of Long Fingernails).

Never a shrinking violet, Malla was enthusiast when he spoke with The Post. “To me, $20,000 -- you win more money on The Price is Right than that. But to me it just seems like a fucking fortune.”

The Trillium Book Award/Prix Trillium was awarded in four categories:

Trillium Book Award in English-language
Pasha Malla, The Withdrawal Method (House of Anansi Press)

Trillium Book Award in French-language
Marguerite Andersen, Le figuier sur le toit (Les Editions L'Interligne)

Trillium Book Award for Poetry
Jeramy Dodds, Crabwise to the Hounds (Coach House Books)

Trillium Book Award for Children’s Literature
Paul Prud'Homme, Les Rebuts : Hockey 2 (Les Editions du Vermillon)

Alice Munro Takes International Man Booker Home to Canada

Celebrated Canadian author Alice Munro has won the third Man Booker International Prize. One of the richest and most prestigious international literary awards, Munro will take home £60,000.

The award is made every two years “to a living author for a body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage,” according to the Man Booker organization. It’s been awareded twice before: to Ismail Kadaré of Albania in 2005 and to Chinua Achebe of Nigeria in 2007.

The Globe and Mail reports with pride:

“I am very pleased -- and absolutely amazed and thrilled,” Ms. Munro, 77, said last night in a statement delivered by her long-time editor and publisher Douglas Gibson. “To be among such candidates for the prize was a great honour in itself. It’s especially great at my time of life to have this recognition of a lifetime's work.”

Ms. Munro, who lives in Clinton, Ont., and Comox, B.C., was chosen from a field of 14 writers, including Peter Carey, E.L. Doctorow, Mario Vargas Llosa, V.S. Naipaul and Joyce Carol Oates. The £60,000 (just over $100,000) prize, awarded biannually, is a spin-off of the Man Booker Prize, the well-known annual award given to a writer within the British Commonwealth.

The Globe’s reportage is well worth reading and summerizes Munro’s award-studded career and even offers up an abbreviated fan list:

Ms. Munro has scores of admirers among contemporary writers, including Cynthia Ozick, who called her “our Chekhov,” and Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections), who wrote in the New York Times that, she “has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America.”

The Globe piece is here. The Man Booker International Prize Web site is here.

My Spine? It’s Tingling!

We’re pleased and proud to announce that The Rap Sheet, January Magazine’s sister publication, has been given a special services award by Spinetingler Magazine. Rap Sheet editor J. Kingston Pierce had this to say earlier today:

Well, my day just got a little brighter. Spinetingler Magazine editor Sandra Ruttan has posted the winners of the 2009 Spinetingler Awards, and The Rap Sheet -- along with Peter Rozovsky’s Detectives Beyond Borders -- has won in the category of Special Services to the Industry. I want to extend my appreciation to all of the Web readers who filled out award ballots this year, and especially to all those brilliant folks who cast their votes for The Rap Sheet (although every one of the nominees in this category deserves acclaim).

You can see all of the winners and nominees in each category here.

Never Shoot a Leacock Medal Winner

Mark Leiren-Young has been awarded this year’s Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. The award, which brings a $15,000 cash prize, is one of Canada’s most prestigious as well as richest literary awards.

The Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour has been awarded since 1947 “as a means to honour the dean of Canadian humourists and to perpetuate humorous writing in Canada.”

Vancouver filmmaker and journalist Leiren-Young wins for his first book, Never Shoot A Stampede Queen. The author has recently been in the news as the writer and director of The Green Chain, a film that has been picking up steam on the festival circuit. He told January Magazine that he’s delighted to have won what he feels is “the coolest writing honour in Canada.”

“When I was a kid,” says the author, “one of my heroes was Eric Nicol. Almost every Canadian writer I admire has either won a Leacock Medal or been nominated for one. I can’t believe the company I’m keeping. As a writer who loves to make people laugh, I feel like I just won the Stanley Cup.”

As Leiren-Young points out, over the years, some of Canada’s best known authors have received the award, including Pierre Berton, Will Ferguson, Ian Ferguson, W.O. Mitchell, Bill Richardson, Mordecai Richler and Robertson Davies. When he discovered he had joined their company, Leiren-Young reports he spent the balance of the day walking around saying, “‘wow’ and ‘oh my God’ so many times that I sound like a teenage girl... with a very deep voice.”

Also nominated for this year’s Leacock Award: Kill All the Judges, by William Deverell (McClelland & Stewart); Kiss the Joy As It Flies, by Sheree Fitch (Vagrant Press); Uproar, by Jack MacLeod (The Porcupine’s Quill); In the Land of the Long Fingernails, by Charles Wilkins (Viking Canada).

Edgar Rules the Day

Tonight’s presentation in New York City of the 2009 Edgar Allan Poe Awards (given to works of crime fiction, both books and other media) seemed to go off with a minimum of foul-ups, but a few surprises. Wyoming writer C.J. Box picked up the Best Novel commendation for Blue Heaven, by C.J. Box (St. Martin’s Minotaur), beating out such works as Sins of the Assassin, by Robert Ferrigno (Scribner), and The Price of Blood, by Declan Hughes (Morrow). Francie Lin’s The Foreigner (Picador) captured the Best Novel by an American Author prize, and China Lake, by Meg Gardiner (Obsidian Mysteries), was named the Best Paperback Original. American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century, by Howard Blum (Crown)--one of January Magazine’s favorite books of 2008--beat out some tough competition in the Best Fact Crime category.

You’ll find the full list of winners and also-rans here.

Awards from L.A.

Indiana author Michael Koryta last night won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Mystery/Thriller category for his 2008 novel, Envy the Night. He was one of nine recipients of this year’s various honors, a list that also includes Marilyn Robinson (for Home) and Terry Pratchett (for Nation).

The Times’ Carolyn Kellogg reports that it was “a scaled-down awards ceremony” during which Koryta and the other victors were named, but one that featured “as much enthusiasm and humor as any of the more grandly produced affairs of recent years.”

Koryta is probably best known for his excellent series about Cleveland private eye Lincoln Perry (A Welcome Grave). But as Dick Adler wrote on this page not long ago, “Envy the Night is that rarest of literary creatures: a standalone thriller that you hope will generate a series” of its own. Koryta’s work has won plaudits as well from Michael Connelly, Laura Lippman, George Pelecanos, and others.

A full list of this year’s L.A. Times Book Prize winners is here.

Annual Book Show Picks the Best

We’re sorry not to have been able to get to the 23rd New York Book Show last Monday, the 24th of March. Nearly 600 publishers, writers, book production personnel, book manufacturers and guests descended on the Grand Ballroom at the Manhattan Center on West 34th Street. The stars of the show were the 170 winning books, jackets and covers. With so many winners, we won’t list them all, but you can see them on the Show’s Web site.

The New York Book Show is sponsored annually by the Bookbinders’ Guild of New York. While the Book Show is the highlight of the organization’s year, they are an active group with interests in both literacy and the art of the book. You can learn more about the Guild, including how to apply for membership, here.

Excellence in Bookselling Rewarded

Even if we didn’t think this was an astonishingly good idea, what book industry professional wouldn’t love the award itself? (Shown at left.)

The Nibbie is gorgeous, and awarded for a brilliant reason: to showcase the talent involved in the publishing and bookselling industries in the United Kingdom.

The nomination process in most categories closed just a few days ago. However, the shortlist for the 2009 Independent Bookshop of the Year award has already been announced.

According to the British Book Industry Awards, who administer the program, children’s bookshops put in a “particularly strong showing, taking five out of the thirty places on this year’s regional shortlists. From this list five regional winners will be chosen to make up the shortlist for the Independent Bookshop of the Year Award to be presented at the British Book Industry Awards being held at the Wellcome Trust Campus near Cambridge on Monday 1st June.”

The complete shortlist is here. Information about the program is here.

Longlist Day in the Litrasphere

Who decided that just a few days after the Ides of March would be the best time to announce the most important longlists on the international book scene? (That’s a rhetorical question, but if there’s an answer, it would be cool to share.)

The longlist for the Man Booker International Prize was announced today. To keep us on our toes, the prize differs from the regular vanilla Man Booker Prize for fiction in that it is only awarded every other year. However, the longlist for the Man Booker Foreign Fiction Prize was announced February 27th. The Man Booker Prize longlist will be announced in September. (Dude: those Man Booker folks are busy!)

Also announced today: the longlist for the Orange Prize for fiction, “awarded to the woman who, in the opinion of the judges, has written the best, eligible full-length novel in English.”

The Guardian does a brilliant job with the Orange longlist, including write-ups and UK cover images from all 20 titles that made the cut. Meanwhile Bloomberg does an even job covering the Man Booker International longlist.

Canada Reads The Book of Negroes

Lawrence Hill’s bestselling 2007 novel, The Book of Negroes (HarperCollins Canada) has won the 2009 Canada Reads. From the Quill & Quire blog:

Hill’s book, the saga of a slave in the 1700s, was named the winner of the annual CBC Radio competition Friday morning, beating out the runner-up, Brian Francis’s debut novel Fruit (ECW Press). A Canada Reads win typically represents a major a sales boost, possibly tens of thousands of copies.

The Book of Negroes has already been a top seller over the past two years; HarperCollins vice-president and publisher Iris Tupholme says around 200,000 copies are in print, with another reprint in the works. “The book’s had a very strange flight path,” says Hill. “It started modestly and it just sort of grew and grew and grew.… Usually, when a book comes out, if it’s not knocking people’s socks off in the first few months, bookstores start sending it back.” Asked about how many likely buyers are still out there in the Canadian market, Tupholme is bold: “We’re not even halfway there.”

Q&Q has put together quite a bit more on this story and it’s here.

In the United States, the book was published as Someone Knows My Name (Norton). Last year, we talked about why the publishers felt the name change was necessary. That piece is here.

You can read more about CBC’s Canada Reads program -- and see how crazy passionate Canadians get about their books! -- right here.

Gaiman to Receive Prestigious Newbery

In 2008, January Magazine loved Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, a beautifully illustrated work of more-or-less connected short stories.

We weren’t alone. The New York Times remarks that the book has received the 2009 Newbery Medal:

Neil Gaiman, a renowned author of science fiction, fantasy, graphic novels and comics aimed at adults, won the John Newbery Medal for the year’s most outstanding contribution to children’s literature on Monday.

Mr. Gaiman, 48, won for “The Graveyard Book,” a story about a boy who is raised in a cemetery by ghosts after his family is killed in the opening pages of the novel. In announcing the winner of what is widely considered the most prestigious honor in children’s literature, the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, cited Mr. Gaiman’s work for its “delicious mix of murder, fantasy, humor and human longing,” noting its “magical, haunting prose.”

The New York Times piece is here. January’s review of the book is here. January’s 2001 interview with Gaiman is here.

Costa Male

Having an awards list from Costa Coffee seems apt when you consider that strong coffee is what you need when faced with a novel that refuses to be put down. The BBC reports that the big issue with this year’s awards is that the shortlist for best novel is all male:

De Bernieres has been nominated for his book, A Partisan's Daughter, which judges described as “an elegant love story about the lies we tell ourselves and why we have to”.

The Other Hand by Chris Cleave tells the story of three young characters, including Little Bee, a 16-year-old refugee from Nigeria, and how their lives intertwine. The book was inspired by the author's early childhood in West Africa and a visit to a detention centre in Essex.

Trauma by Patrick McGrath is described as a “riveting read”

And Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture is about an elderly character approaching her 100th birthday.

There are five categories in all, the others being poetry, biography, first novel and children's. Each category winner receives £5,000.

The overall winner receives £25,000 and will be announced on 27 January, 2009.

Personally I was delighted to see Man Booker longlisted and CWA Dagger winner Tom Rob Smith shortlisted for Best First Novel.

Best Novel Award

• Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
• Chris Cleave, The Other Hand
• Louis de Bernieres, A Partisan’s Daughter
• Patrick McGrath, Trauma

First Novel Award

• Poppy Adams, The Behaviour of Moths
• Sadie Jones, The Outcast
• Jennie Rooney, Inside the Whale
• Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

Biography Award

• Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End
• Judith Mackrell, Bloomsbury Ballerina
• Sathnam Sanghera, If You Don't Know Me By Now
• Jackie Wullschlager, Chagall

Poetry Award

• Ciaran Carson, For All We Know
• Adam Foulds, The Broken Word
• Kathryn Simmonds, Sunday at the Skin Launderette
• Greta Stoddart, Salvation Jane

Children’s Book Award

• Keith Gray, Ostrich Boys
• Saci Lloyd, The Carbon Diaries 2015
• Michelle Magorian, Just Henry
• Jenny Valentine, Broken Soup
  

According to The Independent:

The Costa judges whittled 616 submissions down to 25 books. Known as the Whitbread before it was taken over by the coffee chain in 2006, the competition is unique in bringing together adult and children's fiction as well as biography and poetry.

The overall winner will be announced in January and will receive £25,000.
The youngest contender is the Liverpool-born Jennie Rooney, a 28-year-old lawyer who completed her first novel Inside the Whale during lunch breaks from her legal practice. She will find herself competing in the first-novel category against Sadie Jones, daughter of a Jamaican poet, Evan Jones. Sadie Jones's debut, The Outcast, set in post-war suburban England, has already been shortlisted for the all-female Orange Prize. The only man to make it on to the first-novel shortlist is a former screen writer, Tom Rob Smith, whose Stalinist-era Child 44 was described as "unputdownable".

This year's judges include the author Lisa Jewell; the actress and writer Pauline McLynn; the journalist and broadcaster Michael Buerk; the poet Roger McGough; and the writer Victoria Hislop. A final panel of judges, to include a member of the book-reading public, will be announced next month.

While The Guardian’s coverage includes asking some of the shortlisted authors what they would do with the money. (Charity, says Tom Rob Smith. Lollipops for his children says Sebastian Barry.)

Rushdie or “Scruffy”?

After reporting that Salman Rushdie was awarded the Best of the Bookers this month for 1981’s Booker winner Midnights Children; I was amused to read that Ex-Special Branch detective Ron Evans writes less flatteringly about the award winning author in the UK Telegraph:

In his autobiography On Her Majesty's Service, Evans paints an unflattering picture of Rushdie as tight-fisted, rude and arrogant, and claims the team of protection officers nicknamed him Scruffy because of his unkempt appearance.

He said the protection team were expected to pay him rent for their sparse lodgings in a safe house, and were on one occasion confined to their rooms so Rushdie -- codenamed Joe -- could spent an intimate evening with girlfriend and later third wife Elizabeth West.

Evans was assigned to armed protection duties in 1989, when the controversial author, now 61, wrote the Satanic Verses, which was condemned for its allegedly blasphemous depiction of the Prophet Mohammed and banned in India, Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The revelations make for amusing reading especially when they locked Rushdie in a cupboard and went to the pub. The Telegraph piece is here.

Meanwhile, Rushdie has been nominated for yet another Man Booker. (This time for The Enchantress of Florence.) You can see that longlist here. The shortlist will be announced at the beginning of September with the winner being awarded on October 14th.

Salman Rushdie and the Best of the Booker

We reported earlier this week about the Best of the Booker award. Here's part of the BBC 's announcement:

Sir Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children has won the Best of the Booker prize, as voted for by the public. The 1981 book beat five other former Booker winners shortlisted from the prize's 40-year history. Sir Salman, who was unable to attend the London ceremony as he is currently on tour in the US, sent his thanks via a pre-recorded message. It is the third Booker award for the author, who was also the winner of the Booker of Bookers in 1993.

"Marvellous news -- I'm absolutely delighted and would like to thank all those readers around the world who voted for Midnight's Children," the author said.

The other Booker winners that made up the shortlist for this best of award were:

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (1999)
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (1988)
The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer (1974)
The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell (1973)
The Ghost Road by Pat Barker (1995)

The Independent reports:

Rushdie's post-colonial story about the partition of India won 36 per cent of the vote. At least half the voting public was aged under 35 and more than a quarter of the 7,801 votes cast came from the US. Rushdie, 61, who was born in Mumbai but educated in England, is currently promoting his latest book in Chicago but sent a video message conveying his thanks to voters. His sons, Zafar and Milan, collected the trophy.

He said: "[I think of] how astonished my younger self writing Midnight's Children in the late-1970s would have been about this. It was written with such hope but not with the expectation that this book would still be interesting and relevant to people who were not even born when it was written."

His youngest son, Milan, 11, said while he was still to read his father's magnum opus, he was born just eight minutes before midnight, similar to the protagonist of the novel, who was born on the stroke of 12.

Meanwhile, The Guardian features several downloads:

Audio: Salman Rushdie talks to Stuart Jeffries

Blog: They picked the right winner

In pictures: the life of Salman Rushdie

Read the original Guardian review (PDF)

Read an extract from Midnight's Children

The Guardian Book Club have a treat for Salman Rushdie readers as he will be appearing at a special event at The Shaw Theatre in London at 7 p.m. on July 28, talking to John Mullan about Midnight's Children. Tickets are £10/£8 and can be bought direct from the venue Tel (0044 871 594 3123) or from the UK 0871 594 3123.

Behind the Best of the Booker

We’ve written about bibliophile Mariella Frostrup in the past. Frostrup fronts BBC Radio 4’s Open Book program as well as presenting Sky Arts Book Program. She is also one of the judges of the “Best of the Booker” award which will be announced in just a few days. The Independent reports that Frostrup is a real renaissance woman as well as a friend of actor George Clooney:

The Best of the Booker, [is] arguably the most prestigious literary prize ever awarded in this country [Britain]. The winner will be announced on Thursday, once the public has elected the finest of the 41 novels to have won the Booker Prize. Salman Rushdie is favourite with Midnight's Children, and you can vote online now. But there is a catch. Your own preference -- Pi, say, or Amsterdam by Ian McEwan -- may not be available for selection. The contenders have already been cut down to a shortlist of six, by a panel of three judges including Mariella Frostrup.

The article explains how Frostrup’s life became entangled with her love of books which developed into her fronting TV shows, radio and her own journalism:

She grew up in Ireland, in a house full of books. Her mother was an artist from Scotland, and her father a Norwegian who wrote for the Irish Times. He died of alcohol poisoning when she was just 15. Frostrup was still in shock when she found herself living in a squat in Shepherd's Bush. "Despite the posh tones, I had almost nothing. Even when I was partying a lot, I was also driven by the need to pay the bills."

She broke into TV as a film reviewer but expanded into all kinds of arts and discussion shows. Sexism means it will not last, she says -- “look for the women past 40 on mainstream TV” -- but for now she is not above doing a voiceover for Marks & Spencer while Myleene Klass cavorts in a bikini. Books are what keep her on screen: she has been canny enough to parlay a surprise invitation on to the Booker panel in 2000 -- “I was flabbergasted” -- into a leading role in the literary world. Why was she asked? “For the same reason they ask a lot of people who don’t have a direct connection with books: to lend a common touch to the proceedings, in terms of books being reader-friendly as well as wonderfully crafted and important.”

The full article is here. More information on the Man Booker Prize is here. The Best of the Booker will be awarded at the London Literature Festival on July 10th. Look for the longlist for the 2008 Man Booker Prize to be announced at the end of this month. It will be whittled down to a shortlist on September 9th, with the prize itself being awared in mid-October.

If No Girls Were Allowed to Play in the All-Boys Club, Would Everyone Still Think It Was Such A Smooth Idea?

Here’s The Independent on the judging of The Orange Prize:

The chair of the jury of Britain’s leading women’s literary prize has called for a debate on whether men should be included on the judging panel to ensure a broader mix of tastes.

The Orange Prize, founded in 1996 to redress the gender imbalance in publishing, has enjoyed a long list of judges ranging from writers and literary critics to a model and singers. But while France's main prize for women's fiction, the Prix Femina, allows men as judges, Orange Prize judges are solely women.

The full piece is much longer and it’s here.

Of course, one of the reasons this is heating up right now is the fact that the winners will be announced in London in about a minute. Actually, June 4th. Here’s the shortlist.

The Rap Sheet Gets a Nod

Congratulations to our own J. Kingston Pierce and The Rap Sheet for receiving a nomination for an Anthony Award for Best Web site.

The Rap Sheet started life nearly a decade ago as January Magazine’s crime fiction newsletter under January senior editor Pierce’s direct control and influence. Two years ago, we opted to spin TRS completely free from January, and though some of our regular contributors -- myself and Pierce included -- write for both publications, The Rap Sheet is an independent entity. That being the case, we couldn’t be more pleased with this nomination. Everyone at January is very proud to see the Sheet recognized in this way.

The Anthony Awards rank among crime fiction’s highest. The winners are selected by attendees at the annual Bouchercon World Mystery Convention, which is also where the awards are presented. This year, the convention will be held in Baltimore, from October 9th to 12th.

To see the complete Anthony shortlist, as well as some of Pierce’s thoughts on the nomination, the Rap Sheet piece is here.

Book of Negroes Wins International Literary Award

Canadian Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes (HarperCollins Canada) was awarded top honors and a £10,000 for 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Overall Best Book Award.

According to a press release, other cool perks are involved with the award:

As well as winning the £10,000 prize, Overall Best Book winner Lawrence Hill will travel to London for an audience with the Head of the Commonwealth, HM Queen Elizabeth II, at Buckingham Palace, accompanied by Commonwealth Foundation Director, Dr Mark Collins. He will also meet with Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma at the Commonwealth’s Marlborough House headquarters, and give a public reading from his winning book at Foyles' flagship London bookstore.

According to Bloomberg:

Hill’s “The Book of Negroes'” is written in the voice of an 18th-century West African named Aminata Diallo who is abducted from her village as an 11-year-old girl, becomes a slave in South Carolina, wins her freedom during the American Revolutionary War and finds her way back to Sierra Leone. The book has been published in the U.S. under the title “Someone Knows My Name.”

Bloomberg’s full piece is here. A full list of winners can be found here. CanWest News Service sums it all up here.

The Great Man Wins PEN/Faulkner

Kate Christensen has been awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. The award is a national prize which honors the best published works of fiction by American citizens in a calendar year.

The Washington Post breaks the story:

PEN/Faulkner judge Molly Giles called the novel “intelligent, consistently entertaining and original.” Fellow judge Victor LaValle called the women at its center “defiant, infuriating and alive.”

**(I guess that “alive” thing would be to contrast and compare with The Lovely Bones, where the central female character was not.)

The Post found Christensen in her laundry room:

“I’m really shocked,” said Christensen, 45, who was doing the laundry in her Brooklyn home when the phone call came. All writers know about the PEN/Faulkner Award, she said, but to her “it’s always seemed unattainable.”

Also in the running:

The Maytrees (HarperCollins) by Annie Dillard
The Indian Clerk (Bloomsbury USA) by David Leavitt
The Gateway: Stories (Southern Methodist University Press) by T.M. McNally
Chemistry and Other Stories (Picador) by Ron Rash

Last year, January ran a review of The Great Man by Tony Buchsbaum:

Christensen’s writing is luminous and enviably informed. I found things to love on every page. Using the telling detail, the thought, the gesture, she builds characters -- but even more impressive, she builds character. Reading about these people, you like them. You feel warmed by them, entertained by them. You can see yourself sitting down for dinner with them and delighted to say not one word for hours, listening to their every reminiscence.

You can read all of Buchsbaum’s review here.

** To avoid the confusion possible by introducing the idea of Alice Sebold’s wonderful 2003 novel here, I should say that The Lovely Bones was neither a winner of nor shortlisted for The PEN/Faulkner. (Frankly, there are people spinning at the mere whisper.) However, the book won the American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award for Adult Fiction in 2003.

Diaz and Danticat Take Home Prizes

Bloomberg boils the National Book Critics Award down so neatly, no more need be said:

Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead Books) won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, while Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying (Knopf) won for autobiography. Joyce Carol Oates, who was nominated in both categories, won no prizes.

The full piece is here.

Gwyn Awarded 2008 Charles Taylor Prize

Richard Gwyn has been awarded the seventh annual Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction for his book, John A.: The Man Who Made Us: The Life and Times of John A. Macdonald (Random House Canada). The prestigious $25,000.00 prize was awarded at a luncheon today in the Sovereign Ballroom of Toronto’s Le Royal Meridien King Edward Hotel.

The jury described the winning book as “a lively but thorough biography of John A. Macdonald up to the day of Confederation in 1867, Richard Gwyn brings to life the young Scottish-born lawyer who found himself unexpectedly entering politics in Kingston in 1844. Gwyn writes from a twenty-first century perspective while painting for his readers a vivid image of nineteenth century Canada: its society, customs, characters and politics. Gwyn helps us understand Macdonald’s genius and vision, which would shape the nation that grew to the north of the United States.”

The Globe & Mail felt that Gwyn’s win was “something of an anomaly for the Taylor prize. Since its creation in 2000, its juries, regardless of their composition, have tended to favour books of a personal, autobiographical or family nature, not works of historical biography or social history.” The single exception, The Globe noted was the late Carol Shields’ 2002 win Jane Austen: A Life.

Richard Gwyn is an award-winning author and journalist. He is the author of two previous biographies: The Unlikely Revolutionary, about Newfoundland premier Joey Smallwood and The Northern Magus about former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Also nominated:

• The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and Son by David Gilmour (Thomas Allen)
• From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People by Lorna Goodison (McClelland & Stewart)
• Lost Genius: The Story of a Forgotten Musical Maverick by Kevin Bassana (McClelland & Stewart)
• Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of Reszo Kasztner, Unknown Hero of the Holocaust by Anna Porter (Douglas & McIntyre)

Written a Poem, Mate?

Australian kids will want to start sharpening their pencils in time to submit their work to The Dorothea Mackellar Poetry Awards, “the oldest and largest poetry competition for school students in Australia.” According to the Web site:

The poetry awards aim to capture the imagination of students, inspiring them to express their thoughts creatively through poetry; while celebrating the legendary work of Dorothea Mackellar, author of the famous poem “My Country.” It is a unique national event, giving Australia’s young people a voice and an opportunity to strive for excellence in literature.

Barbara Guest, the awards program’s project manager, adds that the competition is “Australia’s biggest poetry writing event for school students, attracting more than 15,000 entries.”

The event is supported by the Australian government and is held in conjunction with National Literacy and Numeracy Week, September 1st to 7th.

The Web site for the Dorothea Mackellar Poetry Awards is very good and is stuffed with all the information you could possibly need to move forward with an entry, including resource notes for teachers and poetry writing tips for students.

2008 Newbery Honors Creative Librarian

This year’s Newbery Award-winning book, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village (Candlewick), began life a decade ago as a classroom project at the Park School of Baltimore, where librarian-turned-author Laura Amy Schlitz has been working since the early 1990s.

The Newbery Medal was founded in 1922 and is awarded for “best children’s book in the United States.” Previous Newbery winners include Louis Sachar’s Holes (1999), Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson (1978), Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1963), King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry (1949) and The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting (1923).

A complete list of Newbery-winning books is here.

Three Newbery honor books are chosen each year. In 2008 they are Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis (Scholastic), The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt (Clarion) and Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson (Putnam).

At the same time, the Randolph Caldecott award for top picture book went to Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Orson Scott Card won the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults while Mo Willems was awarded the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award for the most distinguished book for beginning readers for her There Is a Bird in Your Head!

The awards honor books for children published in the United States and were announced by the American Library Association, currently meeting in Philadelphia.

And the Winners Are...

The winners of the National Book Awards were announced last night in a ceremony in New York. Though there has already been much written about the event, it seemed to me that Sarah Weinman boiled it down most touchingly:

Like this year and last, I had a good time at the Book Awards. Why? Because even though the dress-up quotient was high and the speeches were long, I always feel a palpable love of literature in the room, even if it's not necessarily correlated to the nominated books.

Meanwhile, Edward Champion did a blow-by-blow throughout the evening.

The winners are as follows:

Fiction:

Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Also nominated:

Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Varieties of Disturbance, by Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris (Little, Brown & Company)
Like You’d Understand, Anyway, by Jim Shepard (Alfred A. Knopf)

Non-Fiction:

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner (Doubleday)

Also nominated:

Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat (Alfred A. Knopf)
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens (Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA)
Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, by Woody Holton (Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Ralph Ellison: A Biography, by Arnold Rampersad (Alfred A. Knopf)

Poetry:

Time and Materials, by Robert Hass (Ecco/HarperCollins)

Also nominated:

Magnetic North, by Linda Gregerson (Houghton Mifflin Company)
The House on Boulevard St., by David Kirby (Louisiana State University Press)
Old Heart, by Stanley Plumly (W.W. Norton & Company)
Messenger, by Ellen Bryant Voigt (W.W. Norton & Company)

Young People’s Literature:

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown & Company)

Also nominated:

Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One, by Kathleen Duey (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
Touching Snow, by M. Sindy Felin (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick (Scholastic Press)
Story of a Girl, by Sara Zarr (Little, Brown & Company)

Elizabeth Hay Wins Giller

Elizabeth Hay has won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s richest literary award. Here’s what Reuters reported that she said:

“I feel very lucky, so lucky in fact that I will probably be hit by a truck tomorrow so it is important that I say my thank-you’s now,” said Hay, who was previously nominated for the prize in 2000 for A Student of Weather.

Meanwhile, Ed Rants reports that Margaret Atwood and her husband, Graeme Gibson, “brought their own dinner in a box to the Giller Prize reception to protest a Four Seasons development that threatens the endangered Grenada dove. They said they could not accept food and drink from the Four Seasons, although they seemed to have no problem occupying the premises.”

(And it's a good thing Ed did mention it, because the article he pointed to at The Toronto Star has since vanished.)

Also nominated:

• Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje (McClelland & Stewart)
• A Secret Between Us, by Daniel Poliquin, translated by Donald Winkler (Douglas & McIntyre)
• The Assassin’s Song, by M.G. Vassanji (Doubleday Canada)
• Effigy, by Alissa York (Random House Canada)

January Magazine’s 2000 interview with Hay is here.

Shortlist Announcements Spike Sales

Around awards time, there’s always a swell of debate: do they or don’t they? Affect sales, that is. Canada’s Quill Blog brings some great news: at least in the case of the Giller Awards, they do:

According to just-released statistics from BookNet Canada, the shortlist announcement for the Scotiabank Giller Prize sparked a sales spike that averaged a 388% increase in weekly sales for the listed titles.

You can read the piece from Quill & Quire’s blog here.

“Bleak” and “Depressing” Novel Wins Man Booker

Irish novelist Anne Enright, 45, has been named the winner of the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for her novel The Gathering, published by Jonathan Cape.

Howard Davies, chair of judges, said the novel was both “bleak” and “depressing” going on to say it was a “very readable and satisfying novel.”

Enright didn’t disagree with the assessment, telling Radio 4’s Today that if they’re looking for a cheery read, “they shouldn’t really pick up my book … my book is the equivalent of a Hollywood weepie.”

Also nominated:

• Darkmans by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
• Animal’s People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)

Doris Lessing Awarded Nobel

Doris Lessing has been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. According to the Quill & Quire blog, Lessing is “only the 11th woman in the prize’s 106-year history” to be awarded this honor.

The New York Times does a great job of summarizing the 87-year-old writer’s amazing life thus far, while The Bookseller does an equally great job in giving it to us in tiny but important bites:

Lessing’s most famous novels include her début The Grass Is Singing (1950), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985) and Under My Skin (1994). She was born in Persia (now Iran) to British parents in 1919; she grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe); went to school in Salisbury; and moved to London in 1949, where she still lives.

Ed Champion wraps it all up even tighter (“A nice choice.”) with a collection of really terrific links, while asking, “Is Doris Lessing the first Nobel laureate with a MySpace page?” where Lessing herself asks, “Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.”

2007 NBA Shortlist Bound to Invite Controversy

The shortlists for the 2007 National Book Awards were announced today and include at least one title bound to bring the competition more press coverage than usual.

Within an hour of the announcement that Christopher Hitchens’ controversial bestseller God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything had been nominated in the non-fiction category, news agencies started filing stories that featured Hitchens’ inclusion. “Anti-religion book a nominee for National Book Awards,” CBC News told its readers.

Overall, the 2007 shortlist seems to represent a larger than usual percentage of books that many readers will find accessible: and might even find on their shelves including Time and Materials, former US Poet Laureate Robert Hass’ first collection in 10 years; The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie; Jim Shepard’s collection of stories, Like You’d Understand, Anyway; Edwidge Danticat’s memoir, Brother, I'm Dying; Arnold Rampersad’s biography of Ralph Ellison and Legacy of Ashes, Tim Weiner’s history of the CIA.

2007’s very tough field will be narrowed down on November 14th at a benefit dinner and ceremony in Manhattan to be hosted by writer, humorist and best dressed list hall of famer Fran Lebowitz. The winner in each category will receive $10,000 plus a bronze
statue while each finalist has received a bronze medal and a $1,000 cash award. That evening Joan Didion and Terry Gross will receive special awards: Didion will receive the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and Gross for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

There are several events planned leading up to the festivities on November 14th. You can read about them here.

Here’s the full list of finalists for the 2007 National Book Awards:

Fiction:
Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Varieties of Disturbance, by Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris (Little, Brown & Company)
Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Like You’d Understand, Anyway, by Jim Shepard (Alfred A. Knopf)

Nonfiction:
Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat (Alfred A. Knopf)
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens (Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA)
Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, by Woody Holton (Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Ralph Ellison: A Biography, by Arnold Rampersad (Alfred A. Knopf)
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner (Doubleday)

Poetry:
Magnetic North, by Linda Gregerson (Houghton Mifflin Company)
Time and Materials, by Robert Hass (Ecco/HarperCollins)
The House on Boulevard St., by David Kirby (Louisiana State University Press)
Old Heart, by Stanley Plumly (W.W. Norton & Company)
Messenger, by Ellen Bryant Voigt (W.W. Norton & Company)

Young People’s Literature:
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown & Company)
Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One, by Kathleen Duey (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
Touching Snow, by M. Sindy Felin (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick (Scholastic Press)
Story of a Girl, by Sara Zarr (Little, Brown & Company)

Giller Prize Longlist Announced

The longlist for the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Awards was announced yesterday. This narrows the field to 15 from the 108 books submitted for consideration. The Scotiabank Giller was named in honour of the late literary journalist Doris Giller. It was founded in 1994 by her husband, Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch, and is Canada’s richest literary prize: it awards $40,000 annually to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English and $2,500 to each of the finalists.

The shortlist for this year’s Giller Prize will be announced on October 9th with the winner to be awarded in a televised black-tie ceremony on November 6th.

The 2007 Scotiabank Giller longlist is:

• Soucouyant, by David Chariandy (Arsenal Pulp Press)
• Zero Gravity, by Sharon English (The Porcupine’s Quill)
• Helpless, by Barbara Gowdy (HarperCollins Canada)
• Late Nights on Air, by Elizabeth Hay (McClelland & Stewart)
• The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill (HarperCollins Canada)
• Stormy Weather, by Paulette Jiles (HarperCollins Canada)
• Lauchlin of the Bad Heart, by D.R. MacDonald (HarperCollins Canada)
• The Reckoning of Boston Jim, by Claire Mulligan (Brindle & Glass)
• Conceit, by Mary Novik (Doubleday Canada)
• Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje (McClelland & Stewart)
• A Secret Between Us, by Daniel Poliquin, translated by Donald Winkler (Douglas & McIntyre)
• The Assassin’s Song, by M.G. Vassanji (Doubleday Canada)
• The Architects Are Here, by Michael Winter (Penguin Books Canada)
• October, by Richard Wright (HarperCollins Canada)
• Effigy, by Alissa York (Random House Canada)

Feathering Their Nests

Although they aren’t exactly the Pulitzer Prizes, the annual Quill Book Awards have managed to gain something of a popular following, primarily because their presentation is televised in America.

There are 19 Quill categories, with the winners in each reportedly chosen by “more than 6,000 booksellers and librarians” on behalf of the Quill Foundation, a group of media organizations promoting literacy. Among this year’s victors, announced last night, are: The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield (Debut Author); The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (General Fiction); The Assault on Reason, by Al Gore (History/Current Events/Politics); What the Dead Know, by Laura Lippman (Mystery/Suspense/Thriller); and Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson (Biography/Memoir). The full list can be found here.

Winners will be presented with their prizes during a “gala awards ceremony” to be held on October 22 at New York City’s Lincoln Center, hosted by NBC Today show personalities Ann Curry and Al Roker. That ceremony will be televised by NBC stations on the night of Saturday, October 27.

In the meantime, readers are invited to cast their votes for which book among these 19 winners that they think deserves also to be named “The Book of the Year.” Register your choice here. Voting will close on October 10.

* * *

Speaking of literary commendations, California author Joan Didion, best known of recent date for having written the painful book-length essay The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), is to be given a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters during the National Book Awards ceremony on November 14. During those same festivities, Terry Gross, executive producer and host of National Public Radio’s Fresh Air program, will receive the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

These announcements come well in advance of the lists of finalists in four National Book Award categories -- fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people’s literature. Those selections won’t be made public until October 10.

Man Booker Shortlist Announced ... and a Consolation

The shortlist for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction was announced at a press conference in London yesterday. When the dust cleared, six contenders were left standing:

• Darkmans by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)
• The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
• Animal’s People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)

The Guardian does a superb job of running down the final six (even if they get a little snarkey at times). Also from The Guardian:

Speaking after the event, this year’s chair of the judges, Howard Davies, admitted that choosing a shortlist from what was widely regarded as an adventurous and intriguing longlist had been tough. “We hope,” he said, “that the choices we have made after passionate and careful consideration will attract wide interest.”

Meanwhile, Michael Redhill, one of the longlisted authors, walked away with the 2007 Toronto Book Award a couple of days ago. Redhill won with what turns out to be his ironically titled novel, Consolation. It’s not a bad consolation, either. Redhill will receive about $11,000 along with one of the most prestigious book awards in Canada. And Redhill was in tough company, including the winner of the 2006 Governor General’s Award, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam. Here’s what the 2007 Toronto Book Award shortlist looked like:

• Inside Toronto: Urban Interiors 1880s to 1920s by Sally Gibson (Cormorant Book)
• Toronto by Geoffrey James (Douglas & McIntyre)
• Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam (Doubleday Canada)
• Consolation by Michael Redhill (Doubleday Canada)
• Uptown Downtown by Raymond Souster (The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box)

QBP Announces Winners

The Quality Paperback Book Club has announced the winners of its New Voices and New Visions Awards.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, a novel by Marisha Pessl, has received the New Voices award for an outstanding work of fiction by a debut author. The New Visions Award has gone to The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.

The New Voices Award was launched in 1984, while the New Visions Award was first given in 1990. Each award brings their authors a $5000 prize but, according to Gary Jansen, QPC’s executive editor, the award program’s role in supporting and highlighting the authors they work with is just as important. “We realize that the vitality of the Club is dependent on nurturing new authors as well as vigorously supporting the achievements of those authors with established careers,” says Jansen. “These awards are QPB’s way of celebrating outstanding literary achievements that have deeply affected both our editors and our readers.”

The Word from L.A.

From all accounts, the 2007 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books was an even bigger success than usual. And that’s saying something. As the L.A. Times reported after the first day of festivities, “LA Times Book Fest Day 1: Shorter Lines + More Food = More Fun.” According to the piece, the food was remarkable. “If there weren't so many book booths and authors running about, we'd think this was a cooking festival.”

Fun and food aside, one of the highlights of the event was the presentation of the prestigious Los Angeles Times Book Awards, held at Royce Hall (also the location of the best secret bathroom find, but that’s from the other story) on Friday night.

The winners are as follows:

Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement:
William Kittredge

Fiction:
A Woman in Jerusalem, by A.B. Yehoshua, translated by Hillel Halkin (Harcourt)

Biography:
Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, by Neal Gabler (Alfred A. Knopf)

History:
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright (Knopf)

Current Interest:
Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, by Ian Buruma (Penguin)

Mystery/Thriller:
Echo Park, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)

Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction:
White Ghost Girls, by Alice Greenway (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic).

Young Adult Fiction:
Tyrell, by Coe Booth (Push/Scholastic)

Science and Technology:
In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, by Eric R. Kandel (W.W. Norton)

Poetry:
Ooga-Booga, by Frederick Seidel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Each prize included a $1,000 cash award.

Who Said Short Fiction Doesn’t Pay?

Julian Gough has been announced as the winner of this year’s National Short Story Prize, with David Almond named as runner-up. Julian Gough will receive £15,000 -- the largest award in the world for a single short story -- for “The Orphan and the Mob.” Almond will see £3,000 for “Slog's Dad.” The three remaining authors on the shortlist -- Jonathan Falla, Jackie Kay and Hanif Kureishi -- will each receive £500.

Announcing the winners, Chair of the judges, broadcaster and writer Mark Lawson, said that “from a shortlist which included an impressive range of subjects, settings and styles, the judges were unanimous in awarding the first prize to Julian Gough. The comedy, energy and originality of both plot and voice set him ahead of the other contenders. David Almond was a very strong runner-up for the accuracy of his dialogue and psychology in a story which managed the difficult task of combining reality and fantasy.”

You can read full details here.

2007 Orange Broadband Shortlist Announced

The shortlist for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction has been announced:

• Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk
• The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
• A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo
• The Observations by Jane Harris
• Digging to America by Anne Tyler

The winner will be announced June 6. The shortlist is here.

2007 Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced

• Fiction: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• General Non-fiction: The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
• Biography: The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher by Debby Applegate
• History: The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff
• Poetry: Native Guard by Natasha Tretheway
• Drama: Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire

A complete rundown of prize-winners (both books and news media) can be found here.

READ MORE: “Great Books the Pulitzers Overlooked,” by Mark Oppenheimer (The Huffington Post).

Philip Roth Named Winner of First Saul Bellow Award

Philip Roth has been named the winner of the first ever PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, “a $40,000 prize named for the late Nobel laureate and one of Roth’s closest friends and literary heroes,” says AP.

The new award was created in cooperation with the Bellow estate and was made possible by a grant from author and philanthropist Evelyn Stefansson Nef. The PEN/Saul Bellow Award will be awarded every two years.

Roth might well be one of the most awarded authors of his generation. He has received the PEN/Faulkner Award three times (for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain and Everyman) and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (for American Pastoral).

Fans of this prolific author don’t have long to wait for a new novel. Exit Ghost is expected in October of this year. Answers.com says that the book will be the last one to feature the Nathan Zuckerman character.

You can read the AP item here.

Don’t Judge a Blook by Its ... er... Cover

Where many writers -- yours truly included -- keep personal blogs in part to let readers of their books sneak a peek inside the author’s skull, increasingly things are working the other way around: where the ramblings inside a human skull are given air on a blog that eventually -- and one way or another -- ends up being available in book form.

Author Cory Doctorow even thinks that writing that begins in blog form can alter the creative process. “Previously, such jottings might have been kept in the author’s notebook,” Doctorow told the BBC, “but something amazing happens when you post them online: readers help you connect them, flesh them out and grow them into fully fledged books or blooks.”

When you have a trend that flows towards being something like movement, after a while you end up with an awards program. Enter the Lulu Blooker, “the world’s first literary prize devoted to ‘blooks’ -- books based on blogs or other websites, including webcomics.”

The $15,000 Blooker Prize is sponsored by Lulu, a POD company. Though, when you think about it, it’s likely not that much of a reach. After all, since Technorati estimates that 175,000 new blogs are fired up each day, it stands to reason that not every single book-destined blog will find publisher support. It might make sense for self-styled self-publishing experts, Lulu, to stay in the center of the books-to-blogs soup. Although, according to the BBC, last year’s Blooker winner blook, Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, “has now sold over 100,000 copies and is being made into a film.”

Here’s the shortlist for the 2007 Lulu Blooker Awards.

Non-Fiction:

• Crashing The Gate by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas (Chelsea Green)
• My Secret: A PostSecret Book by Frank Warren (Regan/HarperCollins)
• My War: Killing Time In Iraq by Colby Buzzell (Berkeley/Penguin)
• Small Is the New Big: and 183 other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas by Seth Godin (Portfolio/Penguin) by Kristin Espinasse (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster)
• So Close: Infertile and Addicted To Hope by Tertia Albertyn (Oshun)
• Words in a French Life: Lessons in Love and Language From the South of France by Kristin Espinasse (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster)

Fiction:

• Albert the Third by Slim Palmer (Exposure Publishing)
• BreakupBabe: A Novel by Rebecca Agiewich (Ballantine)
• The Doorbells of Florence by Andrew Losowsky (Prandial Publishing/Lulu)
• Messages from the Lost Continent conceived and edited by Horst Prillinger (Books on Demand GmbH)
• Methuselah’s Daughter by J. A. Eddy and Dean Esmay (Lulu)
• Monster Island: A Zombie Novel by David Wellington (Thunder's Mouth Press/Avalon)

Comics:

• Born of Nifty: Sluggy Freelance Megatome 01 by Pete Abrams (Sluggy Freelance)
• The Definition of Awesome: Another Joe and Monkey Collection by Zach Miller (Boxcar Comics/Lulu)
• Mom’s Cancer by Brian Fies (Abrams Image)

Hunting for an Envelope

While trying to find an explanation of the Planeta Award for Pedro Blas Gonzalez’s review of The Albanian Affairs, I came across the list of literary awards on Wikipedia.

Now I’m not going to get into a discussion on the usefulness -- or otherwise -- of this resource. This isn’t the time or the place. No debating, for instance, the merits of an unsupervised collective contributing to a megalithic resource that is international -- and unparalleled -- in scope. Whatever the case, this list is the best of one of its kind that I’ve seen. And if you’ve seen better, please let me know so I can share it with our readers.

Meanwhile, here’s the link.

Kiriyama Shortlist Announced

The shortlist for the 2007 Kiriyama Prize has been announced. One winner each from fiction and non-fiction will be selected to share the $30,000 prize. In 2007, shortlisted writers hail from Canada, China, India, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Though eligible writers can be from anywhere in the world, books that are considered for the prize must be available in English and published in the United States or Canada. The goal of the Kiriyama Prize is to annually recognize and award outstanding books that promote greater understanding of and among the nations of the Pacific Rim and of South Asia.

The 2007 Kiriyama Prize finalists are:

Non-Fiction

• The Haiku Apprentice by Abigail Friedman (Stone Bridge Press)
• Blonde Indian: An Alaska Native Memoir by Ernestine Hayes (University of Arizona Press)
• Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin (Viking)
• Tigers in Red Weather: A Quest for the Last Wild Tigers by Ruth Padel (Walker & Company)
• Chinese Lessons: An American, His Classmates, and the Story of the New China by John Pomfret (Henry Holt)

Fiction

• The Inheritance of Loss by Kirin Desai (Grove Atlantic)
• Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami (Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin translators) (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Stick Out Your Tongue by Ma Jian (Flora Drew translator) (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Certainty by Madeleine Thien (McClelland & Stewart, Canada; Little, Brown, USA)
• Behold the Many by Lois-Ann Yamanaka (Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Picador)

The finalists will be announced in late March.

Three Authors Awarded Order of Canada

Authors Howard Engel, Barbara Gowdy and Frances Itani are among the 55 new members to the Order of Canada which, according to CBC Arts, “was established in 1967 to honour Canadians whose extraordinary achievements or outstanding service in various fields have made a difference across the country.” Says the CBC:

The latest inductees will receive their insignia from the Governor General at a Rideau Hall ceremony later this year.

Any Canadian may be nominated for the Order of Canada, while non-Canadians may be considered for honorary appointments. The appointments are made on the recommendation of an advisory council chaired by the chief justice of Canada.