Costa Book Awards 2011 Category Winners

The winners of the various categories in the Costa Book Awards were announced in the UK overnight.

The winner in each category receives £5,000. From these category winners the Costa Book of the Year 2011 will be chosen, the winner receiving a further £30,000. The Costa Book of the Year 2011 will be announced on 24th January 2012.

Costa Biography Award

• Now All Roads Lead to France : the last years of Edward Thomas by Matthew Hollis ~ an account of the last five years of the life of author Edward Thomas and his friendship with poet Robert Frost and his decision to fight in WWI
• Judges comments: “dramatic and engrossing“

Costa Novel Award

• Pure by Andrew Miller ~ set in Paris 1785
• Judges comments: Created a “structurally and stylistically flawless historical novel”

Costa First Novel Award

• Tiny Sunbirds Far Away by Christie Watson ~ this first novel by children’s nurse Watson is set in the Niger Delta.
• Judges comments: “readability and literary merit go hand in hand in this vibrant gem of a novel.”

Costa Poetry Award

• The Bees by Carol Ann Duffy ~ Carol Ann Duffy is the Poet Laureate in Britain.
• Judges comments: “We were thrilled by the poet’s musical feeling for language and her spellbinding ability to combine naturalness and formal complexity. It’s a joyful collection.”

Costa Children’s Book Award

• Blood Red Road by Moira Young ~ currently being adapted for film.

You can read about the Costa Book Award 2011 shortlist here.

Irish award might help you choose a good read for 2012

With a prize of €100,000, the International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award is the world’s most valuable annual literary prize for a single work of fiction published in English. The Award is a result of a partnership between Dublin City Council and IMPAC, a company which operates in over 50 countries and is administered by Dublin City Public Libraries.

The unique thing about this award is that the nominations are made by libraries in capital and major cities all over the world, each participating library being able to make 3 nominations on the basis of ‘high literary merit’ as determined by the nominating library.

Our own State Library of NSW is one of the participants.

The longlist was announced yesterday and if you click here you can read the full long list and also read a plot summary of each one. A judging panel then comes to a shortlist of 10 titles (due in April 2012) before the winner is announced in June 2012.

This year the 147 eligible nominated novels have come from 122 cities and 45 countries worldwide. Thirty-four of the nomintated titles have been translated into English from 18 different languages. Thirty-one of the nominated titles are first novels.

Australian nominees are Roger McDonald for When Colts Ran, Kim Scott for That Deadman Dance and Chris Womersley for Bereft.

Man Booker Prize Winner 2011

Three times shortlisted author Julian Barnes is the winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011 for his novel, The Sense of an Ending.

The Sense of an Ending is his first novel since 2005. His previously shortlisted novels are Arthur and George (2005), England, England (1998) and Flaubert’s Parrot(1984). Barnes has won several other prestigious prizes; he is the only writer to have won both the Prix Médicis (for Flaubert’s Parrot) and the Prix Femina (for Talking it Over), he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 2004 and earlier this year he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature in 2011 for his lifetime achievement in literature.

Dame Stella Rimington, Chair of the 2011 judges, made the announcement at the awards dinner at London’s Guildhall. Julian Barnes was presented with a cheque for £50,000. Dame Stella Rimington commented, ‘Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending has the markings of a classic of English Literature. It is exquisitely written, subtly plotted and reveals new depths with each reading.’ [Man Booker website]

The Sense of an Ending

The story of a man coming to terms with the mutable past, Julian Barnes’s new novel is laced with his trademark precision, dexterity and insight. It is the work of one of the world’s most distinguished writers.

Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they navigated the girl drought of gawky adolescence together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they swore to stay friends forever. Until Adrian’s life took a turn into tragedy, and all of them, especially Tony, moved on and did their best to forget.

Now Tony is in middle age. He’s had a career and a marriage, a calm divorce. He gets along nicely, he thinks, with his one child, a daughter, and even with his ex-wife. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove. The unexpected bequest conveyed by that letter leads Tony on a dogged search through a past suddenly turned murky. And how do you carry on, contentedly, when events conspire to upset all your vaunted truths? [Fantastic Fiction]

You can read about the Man Booker shortlisted novels here.

Nobel Prize in Literature 2011

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. Mr. Tranströmer is the first poet to win this most prestigious of prizes since Poland’s Wislawa Szymborska in 1996.

Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, praised Tranströmer’s “exquisite” language and said, ”he is writing about the big questions – death, history, memory, nature. Human beings are sort of the prism where all these great entities meet and it makes us important. You can never feel small after reading the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer.”

Here is one poem. You can also listen to it being read by Chris Moran in a Guardian podcast here.

 Alone

                 I

One evening in February I came near to dying here.
The car skidded sideways on the ice, out
on the wrong side of the road. The approaching cars –
their lights – closed in.

My name, my girls, my job
broke free and were left silently behind
further and further away. I was anonymous
like a boy in a playground surrounded by enemies.

The approaching traffic had huge lights.
They shone on me while I pulled at the wheel
in a transparent terror that floated like egg white.
The seconds grew – there was space in them –
they grew as big as hospital buildings.

You could almost pause
and breathe out for a while
before being crushed.

Then something caught: a helping grain of sand
or a wonderful gust of wind. The car broke free
and scuttled smartly right over the road.
A post shot up and cracked – a sharp clang – it
flew away in the darkness.

Then – stillness. I sat back in my seat-belt
and saw someone coming through the whirling snow
to see what had become of me.

    II

I have been walking for a long time
on the frozen Östergötland fields.
I have not seen a single person.

In other parts of the world
there are people who are born, live and die
in a perpetual crowd.

To be always visible – to live
in a swarm of eyes –
a special expression must develop.
Face coated with clay.

The murmuring rises and falls
while they divide up among themselves
the sky, the shadows, the sand grains.

I must be alone
ten minutes in the morning
and ten minutes in the evening.
– Without a programme.

Everyone is queuing at everyone’s door.

Many.

One.

Translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton who said,  “Some poets use their own language so densely they won’t translate at all. Tranströmer is not one of these. In many ways the language he uses is relatively unadventurous and simple [but] he gives people unusual images [which are] sometimes very surprising and give the reader a shock. That should be what poets do.”

Tomas Tranströmer suffered a stroke over 20 years ago which left his ability to speak severely affected. At a recent appearance in London, his words were read by others, while Tranströmer contributed by playing pieces specially composed for him to play on the piano with only his left hand.

Cringeworthy stuff – and my favourite!

This is one of my favourite literary prizes. The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is different from other contests because it rewards bad writing – in honour of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford and its much-quoted opening, “It was a dark and stormy night”. Contestants are required to compose bad opening sentences to imaginary novels.

This year’s winner is a university professor, Sue Fondrie, whose description of thoughts like mutilated sparrows, the shortest winner in the prize’s 29 year history, has been declared the worst sentence of the year :

Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.

The Runner-Up is Rodney Reed with :

As I stood among the ransacked ruin that had been my home, surveying the aftermath of the senseless horrors and atrocities that had been perpetrated on my family and everything I hold dear, I swore to myself that no matter where I had to go, no matter what I had to do or endure, I would find the man who did this . . . and when I did, when I did, oh, there would be words.

Category Winners are as follows :

Adventure - From the limbs of ancient live oaks moccasins hung like fat black sausages — which are sometimes called boudin noir, black pudding or blood pudding, though why anyone would refer to a sausage as pudding is hard to understand and it is even more difficult to divine why a person would knowingly eat something made from dried blood in the first place — but be that as it may, our tale is of voodoo and foul murder, not disgusting food.

Crime – Wearily approaching the murder scene of Jeannie and Quentin Rose and needing to determine if this was the handiwork of the Scented Strangler–who had a twisted affinity for spraying his victims with his signature raspberry cologne–or that of a copycat, burnt-out insomniac detective Sonny Kirkland was sure of one thing: he’d have to stop and smell the Roses.

Fantasy - Within the smoking ruins of Keister Castle, Princess Gwendolyn stared in horror at the limp form of the loyal Centaur who died defending her very honor; “You may force me to wed,” she cried at the leering and victorious Goblin King, “but you’ll never be half the man he was. “

Historical Fiction – Napoleon’s ship tossed and turned as the emperor, listening while his generals squabbled as they always did, splashed the tepid waters in his bathtub.

Purple Prose – As his small boat scudded before a brisk breeze under a sapphire sky dappled with cerulean clouds with indigo bases, through cobalt seas that deepened to navy nearer the boat and faded to azure at the horizon, Ian was at a loss as to why he felt blue.

Romance – As the dark and mysterious stranger approached, Angela bit her lip anxiously, hoping with every nerve, cell, and fiber of her being that this would be the one man who would understand—who would take her away from all this—and who would not just squeeze her boob and make a loud honking noise, as all the others had.

Sci Fi - Morgan ‘Bamboo’ Barnes, Star Pilot of the Galaxia (flagship of the Solar Brigade), accepted an hors d’oeuvre from the triangular-shaped platter offered to him from the Princess Qwillia—lavender-skinned she was and busty, with o of her four eyes what Barnes called ‘bedroom eyes’—and marveled at how on her planet, Chlamydia-5, these snacks were called ‘Hi-Dee-Hoes’ but on Earth they were simply called Ritz Crackers with Velveeta.

Western – The laser-blue eyes of the lone horseman tracked the slowly lengthening lariat of a Laredo dawn as it snaked its way through Dead Man’s Pass into the valley below and snared the still sleeping town’s tiny church steeple in a noose of light with the oh-so-familiar glow of a Dodge City virgin’s last maiden blush.

You can read the Runners-up and Dishonourable Mentions in all categories here.

Now for Not the Booker Prize

Hot on the heels of the announcement of the ‘Man Booker Dozen’, The Guardian has kicked off the 2011 Not the Booker Prize competition.

Not the Booker Prize came into being three years ago in the wake of much criticism of the Man Booker judges choices.

These criticisms fell/fall into three main camps (Guardian Books Blog July 2009) :

1) Your favourite book didn’t win. This is the most egregious error the judges make, and they make it again and again. Worse still, instead of your favourite book, they select one that is at best mediocre and at worst thoroughly dull. What’s wrong with them?

2) The books are always about post-colonial guilt, Irish poverty or English middle-class Islingtonians having Terribly Important Thoughts about their boring love lives … Where’s the SF? Is that not literature? Where’s the danger? Where’s the challenge? Surely they are missing something.

3) The panel are unrepresentative. Who are these people? Who chooses them? Why should, say, James Naughtie be judging this year’s prize? Are they really better judges than you or I?

So the question arose – can we out here in the real world do better? Do we have more wisdom than the panel? Can we come up with a more interesting shortlist? Can we pick a better winner? Or will we, indeed, choose the same one?

So go on over to The Guardian, read their Terms and Conditions for the Not the Booker Prize 2011 (These are the rules. Don’t argue) and start nominating.

The winning entrant has everything to play for with this stunning Guardian mug as the prize.

Man Booker Dozen

The thirteen books on the Man Booker Prize 2011 longlist were announced last night.

The longlisted titles were chosen by a panel of five judges chaired by author and former Director-General of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington, from a whopping 138 books. The so-called ‘Man Booker Dozen’ include one former Man Booker Prize winner (Alan Hollinghurst, in 2004); three previously shortlisted writers (Alan Hollinghurst, Sebastian Barry and Julian Barnes); one longlisted author (Carol Birch); two poets (Alison Pick and Patrick McGuiness); four first time novelists (Stephen Kelman, A.D. Miller, Yvvette Edwards and Patrick McGuinness) and three Canadian writers (Alison Pick, Patrick deWitt and Esi Edugyan).

 

• Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending
• Sebastian Barry On Canaan’s Side
• Carol Birch Jamrach’s Menagerie
• Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers
• Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues
• Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats
• Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger’s Child
• Stephen Kelman Pigeon English
• Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days
• A.D. Miller Snowdrops
• Alison Pick Far to Go
• Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb
• D.J. Taylor Derby Day

The Guardian online has a beautiful “Man Booker Longlist in Pictures” post with the cover art and a short precis of each book and a link to a review of that book.

The shortlist of six will be announced on Tuesday 6 September and the winner will be announced on Tuesday 18 October at a dinner at London’s Guildhall. The Man Booker Prize is worth £50,000 to the winner and each of the six shortlisted authors, including the winner, receive £2,500 and a designer bound edition of their book.

As well as Dame Stella Rimington as the Chair, writer and journalist, Matthew d’Ancona; author, Susan Hill; author and politician, Chris Mullin and Head of Books at the Daily Telegraph, Gaby Wood are on the judging panel.

Hollinghurst and Barnes are the front-runners at this early stage but going on the covers I’m going to back Derby Day, The Last Hundred Days and The Sisters Brothers. I’d have to back The Sisters Brothers for the title too. Next stop The Book Depository????

What do you think? Anyone read any of these authors/titles?

Anh Do Triumphant

Popular comedian-turned-author Anh Do cleaned up at last night’s Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) presentation winning Book of the Year, Newcomer of the Year and Biography of the Year. In the latter category Anh Do shared first place with musician Paul Kelly.

In his popular memoir, The Happiest Refugee, Anh Do describes his family’s flight from Vietnam to Australia in a boat, their struggle to establish themselves in Australia and his career as a stand up comedian.

It is both ironic and inspirational that Anh Do had learning difficulties as a child and was in the remedial learning class at school, thinking he wasn’t smart. You can listen to his story in this ABC 702 radio interview with Adam Spencer.

The Happiest Refugee can be found on the Library’s shelves at 920 DO (or will eventually, currently it is heavily requested so you may need to put a reservation on it. It is also a title on the NSW Premier’s Reading Challenge in the 7-9 list.

Here are the 2011 ABIA winners :

Book of the Year – The Happiest Refugee by Anh Do

Newcomer of the Year - The Happiest Refugee by Anh Do

Illustrated Book of the Year – Our Family Table by Julie goodwin

Literary Fiction Book of the Year – Bereft by Chris Womersley

Book of the Year for Younger Children – Noni the Pony by Alison Lester

Book of the Year for Older Children – Conspiracy 365 by Gabrielle Lord

Biography of the Year – The Happiest Refugee by Anh Do and How to Make Gravy by Paul Kelly

General Non-fiction Book of the Year – True Spirit by Jessica Watson

General Fiction Book of the Year – The Distant Hours by Kate Morton

Other categories in industry and trade categories can be read here.

Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) Finalists

The finalists for this year’s Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) have been announced.

There are lots of book industry categories including Chain Bookseller of the Year, Independent Bookseller of the Year, Small Publisher of the Year and so on (see all the category finalists by clicking here) but as readers I’ll cut to what I think interests us most :

Illustrated Book of the Year 2011
A Food Lover’s Pilgrimage to Santiago De Compostela by Dee Nolan
Bill’s Basics by Bill Granger
Our Family Table by Julie Goodwin
Quay by Peter Gilmore
Real Food Companion by Matthew Evans
Yiwarra Kuju: the Canning Stock Route by the National Museum of Australia
(seems being a cook book gives you a leg up in this category)

Biography of the Year 2011
Ben Cousins – My Life by Ben Cousins
How to Make Gravy by Paul Kelly
Lazarus Rising by John Howard
The Family Law by Benjamin Law
The Happiest Refugee by Anh Do

General Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2011
Here on Earth by Tim Flannery
Power Trip: The Political Journey of Kevin Rudd by David Marr
Street Fight in Naples by Peter Robb
The Changi Brownlow by Roland Perry
True Spirit by Jessica Watson

 

Book of the Year for Younger Children (0 to 8 years) 2011
All Through the Year by Jane Godwin, illus by Anna Walker
Feathers for Phoebe by Rod Clement
Maudie and Bear by Jan Omerod, illus by Freya Blackwood
Mirror by Jeannie Baker
Noni the Pony by Alison Lester
The Legend of the Golden Snailby Graeme Base

 

Book of the Year for Older Children (8 to 14 years) 2011
Conspiracy 365 by Gabrielle Lord
Graffiti Moon by Cath Crowley
Shakespeare’s Hamlet illus by Nicki Greenberg
Museum of Thieves: The Keepers Book 1 by Lian Tanner
Nowby Morris Gleitzman

Literary Fiction Book of the Year 2011
Bereft by Chris Womersley
How it Feels by Brendan Cowell
Rocks in the Belly by Jon Bauer
That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott
The Legacy by Kirsten Tranter

General Fiction Book of the Year 2011
After America by John Birmingham
At Home with the Templetons by Monica McInerney
Campaign Ruby by Jessica Rudd
I Came to Say Goodbye by Caroline Overington
The Distant Hours by Kate Morton

 

Newcomer of the Year (debut writer) 2011

Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania’s Forests by Anna Krien
Poh’s Kitchen by Poh Ling Yeow
The Bark Cutters by Nicole Alexander
The Family Law by Benjamin Law
The Happiest Refugee by Anh Do

 

Book of the Year 2011

Bereft by Chris Womersley

How to Make Gravy by Paul Kelly
I Came to Say Goodbye by Caroline Overington
Lazarus Rising by John Howard
The Family Law by Benjamin Law
The Happiest Refugee by Anh Do

 

The winners of the awards will be announced at the Australian Book Industry Awards presentation dinner in Melbourne on Monday 25 July during the 2011 ABA Conference.

Miles Franklin Literary Award

That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott was announced as the 2011 winner of the Miles Franklin literary award last night. The award is worth $50,000 in prize money.

That Deadman Dance is a historical novel telling the story of early contact between British colonisers, American whalers and the indigenous Noongar people on the south coast of Western Australia.

The judges described the book as historical and magical as it drifts between the settler world and the Aboriginal world.

“That Deadman Dance is alive in the spaces between these two worlds as they collide and collaborate,” they said.  “We see and feel the hardship, tragedies and aspirations of the settlement, and at the same time we are transported into the mystical and spiritual life worlds of Wabalanginy and his people.”

In 2000 Kim Scott was the first Aboriginal writer to win the Miles Franklin with his book Benang : from the heart. That year he tied with writer Thea Astley with her novel Drylands.

There were just three novels on the shortlist this year. Scott’s rivals were Chris Womersley with Bereft and When Colts Ran by Roger McDonald which we are due to read in September.