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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Charlaine Harris threatened by fans over final Sookie Stackhouse novel

Author of longrunning vampire saga – inspiration for TV’s True Blood – becomes target of online vitriol for her choice of ending.

By Alison Flood

Death threats, suicide threats and more prosaic threats to cancel book orders have followed the publication of Charlaine Harris’s final novel about the telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse this week, after the American novelist gave her bestselling series a romantic conclusion that not everyone was happy with.

Running for 13 years, the series – on which the television show True Blood is based – is set in a world where vampires and other supernatural creatures live alongside humans. The 13th and final novel, Dead Ever After, concludes Sookie’s romantic adventures and sees her making a choice between three potential suitors: the vampires Bill and Eric, and the shapeshifter Sam.

An early copy was leaked online by a fan in Germany last week, prompting an outpouring of bile on Amazon, Goodreads and Harris’s Facebook page, with thousands of comments posted by fans furious about the choice Sookie made.

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Chris Beckett wins Arthur C Clarke award for Dark Eden

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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Chris Ware’s Building Stories leads chase for Eisner awards

Drawing praise … Chris Ware’s Building Stories, which is nominated for Eisner awards including best new graphic album

Graphic novel in 14 parts nominated for five Will Eisner Comic Industry awards, known as the Oscars of comics.

By Alison Flood

Chris Ware’s acclaimed graphic novel Building Stories, which comes in the form of 14 “distinctively discrete Books, Booklets, Magazines, Newspapers, and Pamphlets”, is leading the charge in the Will Eisner Comic Industry awards, known as the “Oscars” of comics.

San Diego Comic-Con International unveiled the contenders for this year’s prizes on Wednesday, with Ware’s entry – which follows the lives of the inhabitants of a three-story building in Chicago – up for five awards: best new graphic album, best writer/artist, best colouring, best lettering and best publication design. Ware’s previous graphic novel, Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, won the Guardian first book award in 2001, the American book award and the French comics award L’Alph Art

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Murakami and Houellebecq lead 2013 Impac award shortlist

Ten novelists in all are left in contention for the prestigious €100,000 prize.

By Alison Flood

Titans of international literature Haruki Murakami and Michel Houellebecq are going head-to-head on the shortlist for the €100,000 Impac award.

The Japanese and French favourites are two of 10 novelists in the final running for the International Impac Dublin award, with Murakami picked for surreal love story 1Q84, and Houellebecq for The Map and the Territory, which features the “celebrated novelist Michel Houellebecq” as a fictional character. The Impac is unique in that its longlist is voted for by libraries from around the world – Houellebecq received nominations from Barcelona and Berlin, and Murakami from South Africa, Ireland, the US and Germany – with a panel of judges selecting the shortlist and final winner.

This year’s line-up features the highest ever number of translated works, with Murakami and Houellebecq up against Icelandic star Sjón’s From the Mouth of the Whale, about an exiled poet, Dutch author Tommy Wieringa’s tale of a lonely musical prodigy Caesarion, and Norwegian debut novelist Kjersti Skomsvold’s The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am, in which a lonely old woman tries to make her mark on the world.

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Amazon tax petition hits 100,000 signatures

More than 100,000 people have signed a petition calling on the online retailer to ‘pay their fair share of tax in the UK’

By Alison Flood

More than 100,000 people have signed a petition launched by an independent bookseller calling on Amazon “to pay their fair share of tax in the UK” and warning the online retail giant that “the unfair advantage that your tax dodge gives you is endangering many UK high street businesses”.

Booksellers Frances and Keith Smith, who count the MP Margaret Hodge and the author Charlie Higson among their supporters, are now planning to deliver their appeal to 10 Downing Street, accompanied by a large crowd of authors and other allies.

Hodge, chair of the public accounts committee, was one of the MPs to lay into Amazon over its tax affairs last year, when the online bookseller – alongside Starbucks and Google – was accused of diverting hundreds of millions of pounds in profits to tax havens.

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How the internet is kickstarting a teen poetry revolution

Sites such as Movellas and Wattpad are seeing huge numbers of teens writing, reading and sharing poetry. Alison Flood investigates the phenomenon and talks to some of the teens publishing their poetry online

Talk to publishers or booksellers about poetry, and you’ll hear the same refrain. It’s niche, it’s difficult to sell – and young people just aren’t interested. Look online and you’ll see a different picture. More than 20,000 teenagers are writing poetry on the social reading website Wattpad, and over 100,000 are actively reading Wattpad’s poems on both web and mobile, while on the young adult community writing site Movellas, there are 20 to 30 new poems uploaded a day, with the most popular read up to 15,000 times, receiving between 20 and 200 comments. That’s not a particularly convincing display of indifference.

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World Book Day aims to be ‘biggest book show on earth’

High browsers … World Book Day

Thursday’s event expects to reach more than half a million with star-studded event beamed to children around the globe.

By Alison Flood

Over half a million children from all over the world will gather to watch authors including Francesca Simon, Anthony Horowitz, Lauren Child and Tony Robinson celebrate the joy of reading on Thursday’s World Book Day.

Dubbed the “Biggest Book Show on Earth”, the hour-long event will take place in Queen Elizabeth Hall in London at 11am on 7 March, and will be broadcast live to cinemas around the UK, as well as shown live online. Children’s author and television presenter Robinson will host the event, Horrid Henry creator Simon will show how to bring characters to life, and Alfie author Shirley Hughes will explain the secrets of illustration.

“The target this year is for three quarters of a million children,” said Robinson. “I’m just about to go and sit in a quiet place and start to think about what I’m going to say. It’s the largest audience I’ve ever played to.”

“I’ll be talking about how to capture your ideas and plan your writing,” added Tom Gates author Liz Pichon, who will also be appearing on stage, along with Charlie & Lola creator Child and Cathy Cassidy. Last year half a million children from more than 75 countries watched the show, and organisers said that over 550,000 have already registered this year, with many thousands more expected to sign up by Thursday.

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Cloud Atlas author translates autistic teenager’s memoir

David Mitchell, whose own son is autistic, translated Naoki Higashida’s ‘revelatory’ book with his wife

By Alison Flood

Painstakingly picked out on a cardboard alphabet grid by its severely autistic author, the acclaimed Japanese memoir The Reason I Jump, which provides a “revelatory” window onto life as an autistic teenager, is being translated into English by the award-winning author of Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell.

Mitchell’s wife Keiko Yoshida spotted the 2006 memoir online. In the book the teenage author Naoki Higashida answers questions such as why he doesn’t make eye contact when talking, why he can’t have a proper conversation and how much he hates being talked down to. Yoshida thought it might be helpful, as the couple’s own son is also autistic. Initially translating it just for their son’s carers and for friends, Mitchell and Yoshida soon began to realise that the memoir might help a much wider audience.

“I could see how helpful it was for her in terms of understanding the autism in our own domestic situation,” said Mitchell. “She did the heavy lifting from the Japanese into English, and in a sense I provided the stylistic icing on the cake. But I also needed to respect the fact that it was a 13-year-old boy writing, not a 44-year-old novelist, so it couldn’t sound as if it was written for the New Yorker.”

 

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Diagram prize shortlist points the way to this year’s oddest book titles

A colourful shortlist for the 2013 Diagram prize for the oddest book title … coloured pencils.

How to Sharpen Pencils stacks up alongside How Tea Cosies Changed the World and a study of the penis on the shortlist for the award which honours the oddest titles in publishing.

By Alison Flood

Will it be a guide to sharpening pencils, a history of tea cosies or perhaps a study of the penis? How Tea Cosies Changed the World – the 160-page follow-up to Really Wild Tea Cosies – is up against How to Sharpen Pencils and God’s Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis to win the little sought-after accolade of the oddest book title of the year.

Loani Prior’s tea cosy extravaganza, containing “24 vibrant new designs that transform the conventional tea cosy into a knitted piece of art”, is one of six books shortlisted for the Diagram prize, alongside David Rees’s “manifesto and a fully illustrated walk-through of the many, many, many ways to sharpen a pencil” and Tom Hickman’s look at man’s relationship with his penis.

A niche guide to pigeon housing, Lofts of North America: Pigeon Lofts, fairy hunter Reginald Bakeley’s Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop and Was Hitler Ill?, an examination from a historian and a professor of medicine of whether Adolf Hitler was fully responsible for his crimes, complete the lineup for this year’s Diagram prize – an award previously won by titles such as How to Avoid Huge Ships, and Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers.

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