Margaret Atwood have won the poetry prize
07 Aug 2012 01:22:44
There's the Forward prizes for poetry, the prestigious TS Eliot award, and now the Attys, a new trophy for online verse named after the Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood.
The Attys, launched by social reading site Wattpad, are specifically for digital poetry, and are taking entries from both amateurs and the more experienced. "Poems can be submitted from anywhere, and we anticipate that some entries will be written on mobile devices," said Allen Lau, co-founder of Wattpad, which is pro... Read Full Story
Self-published authors became the bestsellers!
07 Aug 2012 01:21:01
Four self-published authors will have a total of seven novels on the New York Times ebook bestseller list this weekend, and the founder of self-publishing powerhouse Smashwords is predicting the number is only going to grow.
The highest-ranking self-published author on the 5 August NYT chart is Colleen Hoover, whose ebook Slammed ("A girl falls in love with a neighbour who enjoys slam poetry, but they encounter obstacles") comes in in eighth place, ahead of ebooks by established bestsellers Jam... Read Full Story
What I Don't Know About Animals by Jenny Diski
25 Jul 2012 09:50:18
It is a great pity, when one considers not only the irony that Diski's book is a thoughtful examination of our relationships with animals and their minds, or what we think to be their minds; but also the fact that unless Pudsey turns out to be an unusually rewarding subject with depths hitherto unsuspected, the world would be a better place if people bought Diski's book by the warehouseload instead of the mutt's.
I suppose that on the principle, most lately confirmed by Fifty Shades of Grey, th... Read Full Story
Unpublished Katherine Mansfield's stories
25 Jul 2012 09:46:14
A lost short story by Katherine Mansfield has been discovered in an archive by a PhD student, giving new insight into one of the most turbulent periods of her short life, when she was abandoned by her lover while pregnant and went on to marry a man she left on her wedding night.
Chris Mourant, a student at Kings College in London, was digging through the archives of the literary monthly ADAM when he stumbled across a host of previously unknown material by Mansfield, including three children's s... Read Full Story
She was one of the best children writer!
25 Jul 2012 09:42:58
The prolific and much-loved children's author Margaret Mahy died aged 76 in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Monday, following a short illness. Tributes have been pouring in for the writer, whose humorous and often fantastical stories engaged with the everyday. "It's terribly sad news," said friend and fellow author Judy Corbalis. "It's a huge loss – she was only 76, we might have expected another 10 years."
Winner of many of the world's major children's prizes, including the prestigious Hans Chri... Read Full Story
Jane Austen's novel will have a new 'life'
23 Jul 2012 10:42:32
Val McDermid is to bring a "frisson of fear" to Jane Austen's least-read book, Northanger Abbey, after being signed to write a contemporary reworking of the gothic novel parody.
McDermid is the third author to have been asked by HarperCollins to reimagine Austen for a modern audience: Joanna Trollope's Sense and Sensibility is out next autumn, and Curtis Sittenfeld's Pride and Prejudice the following year. "I was genuinely gobsmacked when I got the call," said the award-winning Scottish crime ... Read Full Story
Denise Mina became the best crime novel writter in this year!
23 Jul 2012 10:41:11
Denise Mina's story of suicide and murder during the financial crisis, The End of the Wasp Season, has won the Theakstons Old Peculier crime novel of the year award, beating John Connolly, Christopher Brookmyre and SJ Watson to take one of the UK's top crime fiction prizes.
Described as a "thoroughly deserving winner and a great example of 'tartan noir'," the Scottish author is the first woman to have won the Theakstons award since 2008 for what judges called a "hugely atmospheric and haunting... Read Full Story
Something interesting about The House of Rumour by Jake Arnott
23 Jul 2012 10:31:56
While all novelists are called upon to fictionalise reality, Jake Arnott stands out as a dark prince of confabulation. In books such as The Long Firm and He Kills Coppers he yoked together the actual and the invented with such verve and authority that it was often difficult to know where history stopped and his stories began.
Both those novels were set in or against the London underworld of the 1960s and 1970s, a cliche-rich milieu from which Arnott unearthed fresh nuggets of subversion and tra... Read Full Story
Black Bazaar by Alain Mabanckou, translated by Sarah Ardizzone
20 Jul 2012 11:07:49
The narrator of Black Bazaar hails, like Alain Mabanckou himself, from Congo-Brazzaville. Known to his friends as "Buttologist", thanks to his deep appreciation of female buttocks, he gives us a vivid picture of the life of African émigrés in Paris. Dressed in the finest designer suits while living in a shabby studio apartment, Buttologist presents a proud image to the world even as he struggles to come to terms with the fact that his partner has run off with a tom-tom player, taking their daugh... Read Full Story
Who became the leader of Forward prize shortlist
20 Jul 2012 11:04:45
Jorie Graham, one of the biggest names in American poetry, is set to go head to head on the Forward prize shortlist with the poet often described as the English language's greatest, Geoffrey Hill.
Worth £10,000 to its winner, the Forward prize for the best poetry collection is one of the UK's top poetry awards, won in the past by Don Paterson, Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy and Ted Hughes. Although Hill, who currently holds the post of Oxford professor of poetry, has won a range of poetry prize... Read Full Story
More details about Huckleberry Finn
20 Jul 2012 10:56:16
A teacher in Iowa has reportedly been fired for telling students that Mark Twain's classic American novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was "racist".
Naiya Galloway, a 31-year-old teaching associate at a private school in Dubuque, Iowa, is alleged to have told a classroom of students last October that the novel was racist and "should not be taught in schools", according to the Des Moines Register.
The next day, according to the report, she described the book as racist again while on a sch... Read Full Story
Broken Harbour by Tana French
17 Jul 2012 07:33:00
It's possibly the most perfect post-crash setting for a slice of genuinely disturbing horror: an Irish housing estate built during the height of the boom years, now mostly empty and abandoned, half-finished, horribly symbolic. In Ocean View, Brianstown – "A new revelation in premier living. Luxury houses and apartments now viewing", trumpets the sign at the entrance – the Spain family has been attacked. The young children are dead, smothered in their beds. Their parents were stabbed with a knife... Read Full Story
