Man Booker International prize goes to (very) short-story writer Lydia Davis

Stories by much-acclaimed American writer, some just a sentence long, praised for vigilance ‘down to the very word’.

By Alison Flood

The impossible-to-categorise Lydia Davis, known for the shortest of short stories, has won the Man Booker International prize ahead of fellow American Marilynne Robinson and eight other contenders from around the world.

The £60,000 award is for a body of work, and is intended to celebrate “achievement in fiction on the world stage”. Cited as “innovative and influential”, Davis becomes the biennial prize’s third successive winner from North America, after fellow American Philip Roth won in 2011 – prompting a controversial walk-out from the judge Carmen Callil, partly over her disappointment in the panel’s failure to choose a writer in translation – and Canadian short story writer Alice Munro took the prize in 2009.

Best known for her short stories, most of which are less than three pages long, and some of which run to just a paragraph or a sentence, Davis has been described as “the master of a literary form largely of her own invention”.

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Self-published book among Commonwealth regional winners

| By Joshua Farrington

A self-published author has featured among the regional winners of the Commonwealth Book Prize.

Ezekel Alan from Jamaica won in the Caribbean category with his self-published book, Disposable People, published via CreateSpace.

He will now go forwards with the other regional winners to compete to be the overall winner of the prize, which is given to the best first novel from a Commonwealth writer. The winner will be announced at Hay Festival on 31st May.

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Hensher wins Ondaatje Prize

Philip Hensher

| By Charlotte Williams

Philip Hensher’s Scenes from an Early Life (Fourth Estate) has won the £10,000 2013 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize.

The book, a semi-fictional account of the childhood of Hensher’s Bengali husband, was praised as “an unostentatious tour de force” by judge Margaret Drabble. Author Julia Blackburn, another judge, said: “Hensher performs a fascinating act of ventriloquism, taking on the voice of his Bangladeshi husband, who was born in Dacca in 1970, when East Pakistan was on the edge of fighting a bloody war of independence. Maybe it is the fact of being an outsider, while at the same time being intimately connected with his narrator, that enabled Hensher to describe the hubbub of a country’s political transition with such immediacy; we enter an unfamiliar world with him and smell and taste and hear it on all sides.”

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Comma strikes twice on Edge Hill shortlist

| Joshua Farrington

Small independent publisher Comma Press has had two titles shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize.

The books, by Adam Marek and Jane Rogers, are shortlisted alongside titles from Jonathan Cape, Pan Macmillan and Bloomsbury, which also has two nominations.

The award, now in its seventh year, is given for a published collection of short stories by a single author. The winner will be announced in a ceremony at Waterstones Piccadilly on 4th July.

Judges for this year’s prize are last year’s winner Sarah Hall, author Lesley McDowell and Waterstones regional buyer Jim Lee.

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Folio Prize to allow self-published work

| By  Joshua Farrington

The Folio Prize has confirmed it is to consider self-published entries, a move which has been welcomed by the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi).

Sixty titles on the 80-strong longlist will be put forward by the Folio’s academy, made up of members of the literary community, and it is understood they will be allowed to select self-published works.

The remaining 20 will be called in by judges following publishers writing letters of support for particular titles. Self-published authors will be able to act as publishers and write letters of support for their own titles, which will then be considered to be called in.

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Sandstone longlisted for Desmond Elliott Prize

 | By Katie Allen

Scottish indie publisher Sandstone Press has scored a nomination on the longlist for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2013 with Kevin Smith’s Jammy Dodger.

Indie Serpent’s Tail also scores a place with Petite Mort by Beatrice Hitchman.

Hitchman joins six other women on the shortlist of 10, with The Marlowe Papers by Ros Barber (Sceptre); The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan (Wm Heinemann); and The Palace of Curiosities by Rosie Garland (HarperFiction) joined by Signs of Life by Anna Raverat (Picador), Wendy Wallace’s The Painted Bridge (S&S) and Seldom Seen by Sarah Ridgard (Hutchinson).

The shortlist is completed by The Fields by Kevin Maher (Little, Brown) and The Universe Versus Alex Woods by Gavin Extence (Hodder).

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ALA Unveils 2013 Finalists for Andrew Carnegie Medals

The American Library Association today announced six books as finalists for the 2013 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction, awarded for the previous year’s best fiction and nonfiction books written for adult readers and published in the U.S.

The 2013 shortlisted titles, (selected from a longlist of impressive books) are:

Fiction:

Canada, by Richard Ford (Ecco).

The Round House, by Louise Erdrich (HarperCollins).

This Is How You Lose Her, by Junot Díaz (Riverhead).

Nonfiction:

The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death, by Jill Lepore (Knopf).

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis,” by Timothy Egan (Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, by David Quammen (W. W. Norton).

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Seren title on Ondaatje shortlist

A title from Seren/Poetry Wales Press has been shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, in the running with Zadie Smith, Philip Hensher and Gavin Francis.

Call mother a lonely field by Liam Carson is shortlisted for the £10,000 prize alongside Zadie Smith’s NW (Hamish Hamilton), Hensher’s Scenes from An Early Life (Fourth Estate) and Francis’ Empire Antartica (Chatto). Completing the shortlist is Patrick Flanery’s Absolution (Atlantic) and Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (Granta).

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Mantel, Tremain, Keneally on Walter Scott shortlist

Hilary Mantel

| By Katie Allen

Novels ranging from Tudor England to the battlefields of the Western Front have been shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, with Hilary Mantel adding another nomination to her prize haul for Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)

Mantel won in 2010 for Wolf Hall.

The £25,000 prize is rewarded to a book written in English, with the majority of its setting being at least 60 years ago.

 

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Harold Fry on Commonwealth Book Prize shortlist

 

 | By Charlotte Williams

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (Transworld), longlisted for the Man Booker, is one of three UK debuts shortlisted for the £10,000 Commonwealth Book Prize.

The Death of Bees by Lisa O’Donnell (Windmill), a tale of two sisters after the death of their parents, and The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood (Simon & Schuster), a story set among Cambridge students, also make the shortlist.

Indian novel Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil, published in the UK by Faber, is also shortlisted; the book was shortlisted for the Man Booker last year.

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