The 2004 Diagram Prize for the Oddest Title of the Year
The prize this year goes to the quite barmy Bombproof Your Horse, which even in these troubling times would seem to be advocating taking things a bit far... Read more
The 2005 Diagram Prize for the Oddest Title of the Year
The shortlist for the 2005 prize was announced recently. My favourite competition of the year is run by columnist Horace Bent in the Bookseller (the UK book trade weekly) with input from dedicated odd title hunters from all over the world. Read more
T S Eliot Prize 2006 shortlist announcement and School Shadowing Scheme
The Poetry Book SocietySpecialist book club founded by T S Eliot in 1953, which aims to offer the best new poetry published in the UK and Ireland. Members buy at 25% discount. The PBS has a handsome new website at www.poetrybooks.co.uk has just announced the Shortlist for the T S Eliot Prize 2006, to be awarded to the writer of the best new collection of poetry published in 2006.
Judges Sean O'Brien (Chair), Sophie Hannah and Gwenyth Lewis chose the following ten collections: Read more
The Poetry Book SocietySpecialist book club founded by T S Eliot in 1953, which aims to offer the best new poetry published in the UK and Ireland. Members buy at 25% discount. The PBS has a handsome new website at www.poetrybooks.co.uk has just announced the winner of the 2006 Prize at the award ceremony in London and it is Seamus Heaney for his collection District and Circle, published by Faber and FaberClick for Faber and Faber Publishers References listing.
The prize money of £10,000 is given by the widow of the poet, Mrs Valerie Eliot, and the Prize is sponsored by the broadcaster Five
The 2006 Diagram Prize for the Oddest Title of the Year
The shortlist for the 2006 prize has received unprecedented international coverage, from the Orlando Sentinel to the Hindu. In the UK listeners were bemused by the Today programme running a competition for listeners to imagine the titles were for a novel and to write the opening paragraphs. Read more
The 2006 Diagram Prize for the Oddest Title of the Year
The winner of this prize has now been announced in the Bookseller and is:
The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by Julian Montague, published by Harry N Abrams.
There were 5,500 votes in all on theBookseller.com, more than ever before. The runner-up was Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan. Read more
The shortlist has just been announced for the 2007 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Poetry Book SocietySpecialist book club founded by T S Eliot in 1953, which aims to offer the best new poetry published in the UK and Ireland. Members buy at 25% discount. The PBS has a handsome new website at www.poetrybooks.co.uk for the best new collection published in the UK and Ireland during 2007.
The 2007 Diagram Prize for the Oddest Title of the Year
It's too early yet for the shortlist for the Diagram Prize, but there are some fantastic early entries and this already looks like a vintage year. Read more
The winner of ‘the world’s top poetry award’ (Irish Independent) has just been announced. Described as ‘the prize most poets want to win’ (Andrew MotionEnglish poet, novelist and biographer; Poet Laureate of United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009; during his laureateship founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work, Poet Laureate) the prize is awarded by the Poetry Book SocietySpecialist book club founded by T S Eliot in 1953, which aims to offer the best new poetry published in the UK and Ireland. Members buy at 25% discount. The PBS has a handsome new website at www.poetrybooks.co.uk to the author of the best new collection of poetry published each year. Read more
‘I never planned to be a writer. It is a very odd way to make a living. Just telling lies... I do have a visceral sense of breaking through the shell of something when I walk into my study in the morning. Now I just go and do it.
Recently I have found myself wondering about the prevalence of rough sex in new fiction written by women. It's viscerally present in You Know You Want This, the new short-story collection by Kristen Roupenian (who shot to fame last year with Cat Person, published in the New Yorker): I found some of the scenes so unpalatable that I had to keep putting it down.
In 1988 the 14th novel by a little-known 63-year-old British author was published in New York. The Shell Seekers, the 500-page story of a woman, Penelope Keeling, looking back on her life and loves during the second world war, took the US by storm. Read more
More than 750 people have signed a Society of Authors (SoA) letter demanding the Internet Archive stops its Open Library project lending scanned books online in the UK. Read more
When asked, Marlon James is hard-pressed to name his favorite story. It's admittedly a nearly impossible request to make of anyone, and surely more so of a novelist, whose trade relies so deeply on both intake and telling, however tangled, of tales. Unable to name just one, James improvised. Read more
Christobel Kent is among the English language's finest crime writers-and finest writers, as far as I'm concerned. In poetic, nuanced prose, she constructs powerful stories about misogyny and violence. Read more
Joseph Heller once told The Paris Review that his editor, Robert Gottlieb, thought "it was a shame" that the reader didn't get to a particular chapter until late in Catch-22. Read more
As self-published works grow in popularity, indie authors are increasingly in a position to market their book to foreign publishers or to agents and producers working in film, TV, and theater. But before authors can do that, they need know their rights. Read more
It should come as no surprise that the long literary con of Dan Mallory began with a fake memoir. Fabricating pain for profit is, after all, a time honored publishing tradition. Read more
‘I never planned to be a writer. It is a very odd way to make a living. Just telling lies...
I do have a visceral sense of breaking through the shell of something when I walk into my study in the morning. Now I just go and do it. Sometimes it doesn't go well, but most often, I'll look up and it's time for lunch and I don't know what happened... Read more
'To be a literary agent: it's a modest job. But it's a job that's important for the writer. It's a position that you take the right decision for your clients. And the problem is that the ego [of the agents] can get in the way. It's very important that the agency is a person, one person. It's not about money.'
"Why am I writing this?"
‘I never planned to be a writer. It is a very odd way to make a living. Just telling lies...
I do have a visceral sense of breaking through the shell of something when I walk into my study in the morning. Now I just go and do it. Sometimes it doesn't go well, but most often, I'll look up and it's time for lunch and I don't know what happened... Read more