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22 October 2013 - What's new

22 October 2013
  • This has been a week full of prize announcements, with Alice Munro being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and Eleanor Catton winning the Booker. Alice Munro's was a popular win, with many people feeling glad it has gone to the veteran Canadian writer, who had only recently announced that she would not be writing another book. Maybe this will make her change her mind, but the sad news that she is too ill to travel to the Nobel ceremony suggests otherwise. She has a much wider audience than many Nobel Prize-winners and was awarded the Prize as ‘a master of the contemporary short story'. News Review
  • We have links to some interesting articles this week: Wylie tells publishers: 'withdraw from Amazon' | The Bookseller, Philip Hensher stirs debate among authors after refusing to write for free and BookBrunch - Creative writing - or creative accounting?, Liz Thomson of Bookbrunch's take on the financial side of Creative Writing.
  • I've met a lot of authors weighing their options, seen a ton of hands shoot up in panels hoping for that one last piece of advice to push them off the fence one way or the other. There's a path on both sides of that fence, and writers can see crowds beating the grass flat. They can see the books that lie along either way. My advice, for what it's worth, is to stop looking at those crowds and those books. Look at the work in your hand. Claire Tomalin author of Charles Dickens: A Life in the Evening Standard in our Comment column.
  • This week's Writing Opportunity is the Trinity College London International Playwriting Competition 2013, closing on 13 December and open to playwrights across the world.
  • If you are looking for copy editing online, it is difficult to ensure that you are getting a professional copy editor who will do a good job on your manuscript. Our page on Getting your manuscript copy edited may help.
  • 'In nearly all good fiction, the basic - all but inescapable - plot form is this: A central character wants something, goes after it despite opposition (perhaps including his own doubts), and so arrives at a win, lose, or draw.' John Gardner in our Writers Quotes.