14 January 2013 - What's new
14 January 2013
- 'The winner of the 2012 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry has just been announced today. It's been won by Sharon Olds for Stag's Leap out of a ten-strong shortlist comprising collections from Simon Armitage, newcomer Sean Borodale, Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales, Julia Copus, Paul Farley, Kathleen Jamie, Jacob Polley, Deryn Rees-Jones and two distinguished American women poets, Jorie Graham and Sharon Olds...' News Review on this week's poetry news.
- If you are trying to get your work into shape for publication, there's plenty of advice on the WritersServices website which you may find useful. Help for writers is a useful starting-point.
- 'Bloomsbury, Headline, Little, Brown, Macmillan, HarperCollins haven't abandoned literary fiction. Let's face it, Hilary Mantel was published by Fourth Estate, part of HarperCollins, and quite a few winners were published from large houses - Ian McEwan, Alan Hollinghurst, Julian Barnes, Howard Jacobson. It's very tough for publishers to publish literary fiction now... Danuta Kean, books editor of MsLexia Magazine, in Bookbrunch, quoted in our Comment column.
- Links to this week's top stories - Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world: Books go digital as print sales slump and J.A. Konrath Advises Writers: 'Get Over Yourself' in his annual Konrath's Resolutions For Writers column: "I really think it is possible to make a very nice living by writing and not worrying about anything else."
- 'Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.' Philip K Dick in our Writers' Quotes.
