David Goldblatt and Ivan Vladislaviċ joint recipients of the Best Photography Book Award

28.04.11 | Jenny Roper

German publisher Gerhard Steidl has been awarded the inaugural outstanding contribution to publishing award at his year’s Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards.

Steidl received the prize last night (27th April). He still independently operates the company he founded in 1972, now holding the world rights to books by renowned photographers such as Edward Burtynsky and Mitch Epstein.

Judge and chairman of the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Michael G Wilson said: “Gerhard Steidl’s dedication to photographic publishing is evidenced by the personal commitment he makes to every artist that he works with and his passionate, self-taught understanding of the printed object.”

Meanwhile David Goldblatt and Ivan Vladislaviċ were joint recipients of the Best Photography Book Award for their companion books on South Africa TJ: Johannesburg Photographs 1948-2010 and Double Negative: A Novel.

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Angry Robot’s Zoo City wins Arthur C Clarke award

 28.04.11 | Bookseller Staff

Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City has been honoured with the Arthur C Clarke Award for science  fiction novel of the year, being tipped to bring “a whole new readership” to the genre. Zoo City’s publisher Angry Robot Books has also been hailed as one of the most “innovative and exciting” genre publishers in the country following the announcement.

The award, worth £2,011, was presented at a ceremony last night (27th April) held as part of the London Sci-Fi Film Festival. Beukes’ novel is set in modern Johannesburg and portrays psychic criminal guilt taking physical animal form.

Award director Tom Hunter said: “This is a great book that promises to inspire both long terms fans of the genre and introduce a whole new readership to the best of science fiction literature.”

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Zadie Smith’s rules for writers

Zadie Smith. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

We asked some of the most esteemed contemporary authors for any golden rules they bring to their writing practice. Here are Zadie Smith’s.

1 When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

2 When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

3 Don’t romanticise your “vocation”. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle”. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

4 Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.

5 Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.

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What they’re reading in Poland

Poland's most eminent reporter ... Ryszard Kapuscinski in his office in Warsaw, 2002. Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty Images

As part of the Guardian’s New Europe series, literary editors reflect on the literary scene in their countries:

By Pawel Gozlinski of Gazeta Wyborcza.

A few weeks ago, Gazeta Wyborcza launched a new bestseller list. If it serves as a measure of the condition of Polish literature, one could say that we have come down with the same illness as the rest of the world: crime Larssonosis, romance-gastronomic Gilbertosis and vampiric Meyerosis. Vampires in particular featured heavily in the ratings; this should be a source of delight for us, as vampires are a Slavic invention. One can learn about their heritage from The Vampire: A Symbolic Biography by Maria Janion, one of the most outstanding Polish scholars of literary Romanticism. If this invaluable work were translated into English (what a pity you haven’t translated it yet), the followers of Stephenie Meyer would have a chance to refresh their knowledge of creatures that balance between life and death. We call them “upiory“, “strzygi“, “brukolaki” or “wapierze“.

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The 2011 TIME 100

Meet the most influential people in the world. They are artists and activists, reformers and researchers, heads of state and captains of industry. Their ideas spark dialogue and dissent and sometimes even revolution. Welcome to this year’s TIME 100.

Franzen, Jennifer Egan and Patti Smith are the writers on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people of the year.

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Bui Chat of Vietnam Wins IPA Freedom to Publish Prize

Bui Chat, founder of Giay Vun Publishing in Vietnam, has been named as the recipient of this year’s IPA Freedom to Publish Prize. He will receive the award from IPA president YoungSuk “Y.S” Chi in a ceremony later today at the 37th Buenos Aires International Book Fair.

Chat, an underground publisher in Vietnam, has printed and published works by Vietnam’s “pavement poets,” managing to evade the reach of censorship authorities. Under Bui Chat’s leadership, Giay Vun has directly assisted in the establishment in Vietnam of other publishing houses that operate independently and freely, publishing the works of banned authors and historians.

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Loos, Lorelei, Literature

On this day in 1893 Anita Loos was born. Loos started writing scenarios for D. W. Griffith while in her teens, and eventually worked on over sixty films, but her most enduring creation is the 1925 novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement as “a masterpiece of comic literature.”

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Anne Sexton, “Her Kind,” Suicide

On this day in 1960, “confessional” American poet Anne Sexton published To Bedlam and Part Way Back, her first book of poetry, titled from experience. One poem in the collection is “Her Kind”; this signature piece would usually start Sexton’s readings and, when the readings became performances accompanied by a chamber rock group, would have her billed as “Anne Sexton and Her Kind.”

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Two Pan Mac on Melissa Nathan shortlist

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 |By  Katie Allen

Titles by Jane Fallon, Katie Fforde and Lucy Diamond have been shortlisted for the Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance 2011.

Fallon was shortlisted for Foursome (Penguin), Fforde for A Perfect Proposal (Random House) and Diamond for Sweet Temptation (Pan Macmillan). The six-strong list is completed by Getting Over Mr Right by Chrissy Manby (Hodder), Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson (Pan Macmillan) and Obstacles to Young Love by the only man on the shortlist, David Nobbs (HarperCollins).

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Room top pick in spring TV Book Club

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 | By Katie Allen

Emma Donoghue’s Room (Picador) has added another accolade to its Man Booker shortlisting and Orange-longlisting after receiving the vote of “TV Book Club” viewers as their favourite spring read of the 10 titles.

The second most popular title was Daisy Goodwin¹s My Last Duchess (Headline Review), and in third was Tiger Hills by Sarita Mandanna (Phoenix).

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