| By Joshua Farrington
The £3,000 Orwell Book Prize for political writing has been awarded to A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa by AT Williams, published by Jonathan Cape.
A special Orwell Prize was given to the late Marie Colvin’s On the Front Line (HarperPress).
A Very British Killing follows events in Basra in 2003.
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Cheering news: Howard Jacobson wins prize for comic fiction
By Jon Stock
Howard Jacobson has been named the winner of this year’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for his novel, Zoo Time. It is the second occasion he has triumphed, having won the prize in 2000, the first year of the award.
Jacobson fought off stiff competition from Michael Frayn, Deborah Moggach and Helen DeWitt. Previous winners include Ian McEwan, Marina Lewycka, DBC Pierre and, most recently, Terry Pratchett.
Zoo Time tells the tale of Guy Ableman, a writer struggling with his affections for his wife and mother-in-law, and the terminal state of literature. Reviewing the book for the Telegraph, Alexei Sayle described it as “seriously funny”.
Jacobson will be presented with a suitably Wodehousian prize, a Gloucestershire Old Spot pig, which will be named ‘Zoo Time’. It will join other pigs named after books that have won the prize, including ‘A Short History of Tractors in the Ukranian’ (Marina Lewycka) and ‘Fun and Games until Somebody Loses an Eye’ (Christopher Brookmyre).
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| Lisa Campbell
A graphic novel about refugees forced to flee their homeland has won the inaugural Little Rebels Children’s Book Award, given by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers.
Azzi In Between by Sarah Garland (Frances Lincoln) was praised by judges for its power and simplicity, as well as tackling a topical and important subject in the contemporary climate.
Fen Coles, director of Letterbox Library, who administered the award, said: “At a time when there are so many damaging myths circulating about refugees and asylum seekers, it is heartening to see a book which tells the truth—and in a way which children can relate to.”
The Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing has also been awarded to a ‘shocking’ account of the working lives of Chinese rural migrants, Scattered Sand: The Story of China’s Rural Migrants by Hsiao-Hung Pai (Verso).
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| By Lisa Campbell
The Guild of Food Writers Awards shortlists include a “wonderful diversity of subject matter” for 2013, the organisers have said.
The annual ceremony awards feature categories such as Cookery Book of the Year, Campaigning and Investigative Food Writing, Cookery Journalist of the Year, Food Blog of the Year and Food Broadcast of the Year. This year’s list includes names like Yotam Ottolenghi, who is up for the cookery journalist of the year award for work published in the Guardian’s Weekend magazine. Also on the list is work such as Consider the Fork: A History of Invention in the Kitchen by Bee Wilson (Particular Books), who is nominated for the Food Book of the Year award.
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P D James
| By Joshua Farrington
P D James is one of the writers nominated for the H R F Keating Award, which rewards biographical or critical books related to crime fiction.
James’ Talking About Detective Fiction (The Bodleian Library) has been chosen alongside Declan Burke and John Connolly’s Books to Die For (Hodder & Stoughton), John Curran’s Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks (HarperCollins), Barry Forshaw as editor of British Crime Writing: An Encyclopaedia (Greenwood World Publishing), Christopher Fowler¹s Invisible Ink (Strange Attractor) and Maxim Jakubowski as editor of Following the Detectives (New Holland).
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By Lenny Picker
It took 18 years, and 10 books, but Dennis Lehane finally got to take home a small bust of Edgar Allan Poe. At the 67th Annual Edgar Awards Banquet, held Thursday night at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan, his Live by Night (Morrow), about a cop’s son gone bad, was named the Best Novel of the year by the Mystery Writers of America. In his acceptance speech, Lehane thanked a troika of James’s who influenced his fiction-Lee Burke, Crumley and Ellroy, before acknowledging his daughters’ essential part in the creative process. “They cost so much friggin’ money,” he noted, to laughter, that he has no choice but to keep on writing. On a more serious note, he credited his early access to a public library as instrumental to his career, something he termed an “act of benevolence, or, as the Tea Party would have called it, socialism.”
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By Leigh Anne Williams
Toronto-based indie press Coach House Books is celebrating with author Tamara Faith Berger after her novel Maidenhead was chosen by the editors of San Francisco-based literary magazine The Believer for its 2012 Believer Book Award, as “the strongest and most under-appreciated” fiction book of the year.
Coach House promoted the book as a more cerebral alternative to E.L. James Fifty Shades series, but Maidenhead ventures into darker and more complicated places. Myra, its young protagonist, becomes involved with a Tanzanian musician and the violent woman who controls him. And, according to Coach House, it follows Myra as she enters “unfamiliar territories of sex, porn, race and class.”
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| By Joshua Farrington
Anne Somerset’s biography Queen Anne has won the 2013 Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography.
The book, published by HarperPress, was described by chair of judges Professor Roy Foster as: “a psychologically subtle and surprisingly vivid portrait of a ruler who has hitherto remained obscure to her biographers”.
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Chris Beckett beat Kim Stanley Robinson and Ken MacLeod to win the UK’s top science fiction prize for his novel about an incestuous colony stranded on an alien planet.
By Alison Flood
Dark Eden, the story of an alien planet where the incestuous offspring of two stranded astronauts struggle to survive, has won the UK’s top science fiction prize, the Arthur C Clarke award.Author Chris Beckett, a part-time lecturer in social work, beat some of science fiction’s best-known writers, including Kim Stanley Robinson and Ken MacLeod, to take the prize. Given to the year’s best science fiction novel, the Arthur C Clarke has been won in the past by Margaret Atwood, China Miéville and Christopher Priest. Dark Eden is only Beckett’s second novel, but the British author is no stranger to awards: in 2009 he beat Anne Enright and Ali Smith to win the Edge Hill short story prize.
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By: Morley Walker
Meira Cook
A little-known novel set against the end of apartheid in South Africa has been named Manitoba’s book of the year.
Winnipeg writer Meira Cook, best known for her poetry, won the $5,000 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award for The House on Sugarbush Road at the Manitoba Book Awards ceremony Sunday, April 28.
Cook beat out her more prominent competitor, David Bergen, whose novel The Age of Hope walked off with two prizes, the $5,000 Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award and the $3,500 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction from the province.
Thirteen awards in total were handed out at the 25th annual event, held this year at the West End Cultural Centre.
Cook’s novel was released in 2012 by Enfield & Wizenty, the literary imprint of Winnipeg-based Great Plains Publications.
Set in Johannesburg during the 1990s, The House on Sugarbush Road focuses on two families, one white and the other black, just after Nelson Mandela has been elected president of racially torn South Africa.
Cook herself immigrated to Canada from South Africa in 1991 at age 26.
The Age of Hope relates the life story of a fictional southern Manitoba Mennonite woman. It was published last year by Toronto-based HarperCollins Canada.
The Winnipeg-based Bergen has won several Manitoba book awards for his past novels. In 2005, he won the national Giller Prize for The Time in Between.
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