Irish and Brits share favourite authors

Marian Keyes and Cecelia Ahern are already going head to head in the Sainsbury’s Popular Fiction Award category at this week’s Nibbies, but they’re now both shortlisted for the equivalent prize in their native Ireland, the Easons Irish Popular Fiction Book of the Year.

Several other authors are also in with a chance of a double win. The Tubridy Show Listeners’ Choice Book of the Year shortlists Sebastian Barry and Aravind Adiga, who are competing for the Border’s Author of the Year Nibbie, as well as Kate Summerscale and Joseph O’Neill, whose latest books are both candidates for the Richard & Judy Best Read. (And the fifth of the six is Rebecca Miller’s The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, a Richard & Judy pick last summer).

You can register your votes on the Irish Book Awards website until 1st May; the awards will be made on 6th May.

Keyes won the Nibbie for Popular Fiction just two years ago, for her previous book, Anybody Out There?, in the category’s second year of existence. The inaugural winner was Audrey Niffeneger for The Time Traveller’s Wife; last year the Nibbie was taken home by Kim Edwards for her debut novel, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter.

Curiously, this means that this award is yet to be won by a British author, although the presence of Sebastian Faulks, Bernard Cornwell or Sadie Jones on the shortlist means an even chance that the sequence will be broken.

The Irish fiction market has long been a source of bestselling writers whom British readers have quickly taken to their hearts. Maeve Bunchy, Cathy Kelly and Patricia Scanlan are among the better-known names, but newer writers such as Anna McPartlin, Tana French and Melissa Hill help ensure that British readers’ apparently insatiable appetite does not go unsatisfied.

The girl who made it to the silver screen

Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy will be coming to a cinema near you.

Swedish broadcaster SVT had initially intended that the films, which they have co-financed, would be aired on television and then released on DVD, but they have been swayed by public enthusiasm for the series to support a theatrical release.

The first book, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is shortlisted for the Nibbie for Best Crime Thriller. This particular award has perhaps the strongest shortlist, also featuring Martina Cole, C J Sansom, Linwood Barclay, Kate Atkinson and Tom Rob Smith, all of whom have also seen very strong sales in the UK.

Book two, The Girl Who Played with Fire, was released in hardback in February and the third and final part of the series, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, is provisionally scheduled for UK publication at the end of October.

The series has sold over 3 million copies in the author’s native Sweden, a country of 9 million inhabitants, and in 2008 he was the world’s second best-selling author, behind Khaled Hosseini.

Larsson was principally an investigative journalist and exposed right-wing extremism both in Sweden and abroad, before his death from a heart attack at the age of 50. His relatives have recently announced an award in his name, for pioneering journalism.

New novel from Nibbie winner

One of the book trade’s highlights this summer will undoubtedly be the publication of The Little Stranger, the latest novel from Sarah Waters. She is the author of Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, Fingersmith and The Night Watch, all of which have either won or been shortlisted for major literary awards.

In addition, Affinity has been made in a film and Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith were dramatised for television; Night Watch is currently also being adapted for the small screen.

Waters won the Nibbie for Author of the Year in 2003, following the success of Fingersmith. Waters was also one of the twenty writers included in Granta magazine’s decennial list of the Best Young British Writers in 2003, alongside authors such as Zadie Smith, David Mitchell, Monica Ali and David Peace.

Gearing up for her new book’s release on 28th May, her publisher, Virago, have set up a website devoted to the author, full of fascinating background information about Waters and her writing career.

The opening section of the first chapter is available on the site and regular updates will allow fans to read the first two chapters in advance of publication.

There’s also an extensive FAQ with gives interesting insights into Waters’ influences and how she goes about writing each novel. The level of research required for an authentic historical novel is considerable, but, as she explains, writers are “like Wombles, picking up stuff here and there – some of it our own stuff, some of it our friends’ – but putting it to new, occasionally peculiar, but hopefully highly imaginative uses”.

She also reveals her enthusiasm for Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, which is one of the candidates for the Nibbie for Best Read this year.

Waters will be embarking upon an extensive promotional tour for the book, which includes an appearance at the Hay Festival on 30th may, where she will be interviewed by Sandi Toksvig. Details of her appearances will appear on the site as they are confirmed.

You can visit Sarah Waters’ site by clicking here.

You’ve got to start somewhere

A recent survey suggested that the life of a writer was the dream of 10% of Britons, more than any other profession. Glamorous occasions like the Nibbies certainly make the idea of penning a bestseller a very alluring prospect and, as any literary agent, will tell you, there’s no shortage of hopefuls out there.

But with over 100,000 new books published every year in the UK – considerably more than in the United States – many authors will see their book in the shops, if they can be persuaded to stock it at all, for only a few months before it is returned unsold. The occasional headlines reporting advances of five-, six- or even seven-figure sums are very much the exception and the average yearly income of a writer is actually less than £4000.

So the other popular image of the writer as the driven artist scratching away in a lonely garret in the small hours, writing by candlelight because there’s no money for the leccy meter, is probably a more realistic vision of what life might be like for an aspiring author.

One of the authors up for Best Read at this year’s Nibbies, Beatrice Colin, recently gave an interview to The Daily Record in which she illustrates this harsh reality rather well. Writing The Luminous Life of Lily Aphrodite, which so many people have now discovered thanks to Richard & Judy’s Book Club, her life was as unglamorous as that of a certain popular children’s writer who wrote her first book in an Edinburgh café:

“I didn’t have a study, I had a table at the top of a landing. It was freezing, so I sat with four or five jumpers on. It was quite dark as there was no window.”

She concludes with the perhaps the best advice of which any budding author should take heed, not least because there’s a chance that your writing will never end up in someone else’s hands between the covers of a finished book: “Write for yourself. “

You can read the whole interview, as well as the thoughts of two other published writers, Carole Matthews and Shari Low, here.

Horrid Henry’s elder sibling

Francesca Simon, the author of the Horrid Henry children’s series, has signed a joint deal with publishers Faber and Profile for a new children’s novel aimed at slightly older readers.

The books is as yet untitled and won’t be published until 2011, but Simon has revealed that the book will be about the Lewis (or Uig) Chessman, the 12th century walrus ivory and whale tooth chess pieces discovered in the Outer Hebrides in 1831.

Horrid Henry Robs the Bank, the latest in her bestselling series, is shortlisted for the WHSmith Children’s Book of the Year at the Nibbies. Simon won the same prize last year, for Horrid Henry and the Abominable Snowman.

She faces stiff competition from, amongst others, the undisputed champion of children’s publishing, J K Rowling, and her latest challenger for global bookshop domination, Stephenie Meyer. And it’s still not too late to vote – you have until Friday.

Would-be Horrid Henrys and Henriettas will be glad to know that Simon also intends to keep writing her Horrid Henry titles, which have now sold at total of over 12 million copies, and that a new deal with Orion, the publisher of the series, should be confirmed shortly.

Fromage frais: odder than baboons?

It’s almost your last chance to vote in this year’s Diagram Prize. Never heard of it? Well, it’s the literary world’s most unusual accolade, now in its 31st year, and is awarded to the book with the most bizarre title.

Currently leading the way, with 31% of the vote, is The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais. But also still very much in the running are Baboon Metaphysics – one for Richard Dawkins, perhaps? – and the invaluable Curbside Consultation of the Colon. Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring was the early leader, but now languishes in  last place, clearly appealing to far too specialist a readership.

The field is made up by the eminently practical The Large Sieve and its Applications and the strangely alluring but also slightly alarming Strip and Knit with Style.

Titles are nominated by readers of book trade magazine, The Bookseller, who run the prize. The winner is awarded a magnum of champagne or a bottle of finest claret. Voting closes on 27th March and you can take part here.

The first ever winner, in 1978, was Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice. Other winners have included The Joy of Chickens, The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling, The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America and Bombproof Your Horse.

Last year’s competition managed widespread media coverage on two counts: the winner – If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start with Your Legs – seemed to breach the usual condition of entry that books with deliberately silly titles not be considered; it was also noted that more people placed a vote on the Diagram Prize than had participated on the public vote on the Man Booker Prize for Fiction (although the Man Booker vote was just a poll rather than being how the winner was decided).

In 2008, there was also a poll to decide the Diagram of Diagrams, with Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers triumphing as the best winner in the Prize’s thirty year history, much to the bafflement of its author, Derek Willan.

A new collection of winners, shortlisted titles and other memorably daft book titles was published last year, called How To Avoid Huge Ships, and Other Implausibly Titled Books, and it makes the perfect gift for both the book lover and people who don’t think books have any real value at all.

The authors’ authors

The best writers are often the best readers too: appreciating the skills of other writers allows them to develop their own. The candidates for the Borders Author of the Year are giving us a glimpse into what inspires them with a selection of their favourite books.

Amongst Costa Book of the Year winner Sebastian Barry’s choices is Netherland by Joseph O’Neill, one of the selections for the most recent Richard & Judy’s Book Club, although Barry’s other choices are more classic texts by Conrad, Joyce and Christopher Isherwood.

US President Barack Obama chooses two acknowledged classics, in Moby Dick and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, as well as a more recent masterpiece, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, about which it was difficult to find a negative word from critics when published in 2004.

Jane Austen is recommended by two authors, with Stephenie Mayer suggesting Pride and Prejudice and Diana Athill plumping for Persuasion. Athill shows a preference for classic doorstops, with War and Peace, Middlemarch and Vanity Fair all making her list.

George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, an account of the Spanish Civil War, is one of Aravind Adiga’s choices, and is already seeing a boost in sales with April 1st marking the sixtieth anniversary of Franco’s victory. It’s one of only three non-fiction choices, the others being Diana Athill’s recommendations of Nature’s Engraver, a biography by Jenny Uglow of Thomas Bewick, the artist whose remarkable illustrations bought the first comprehensive guide to British birds to life at the turn of the eighteenth century, and William Dalrymple’s White Mughals, on the relationship between Britain and India at about the same time.

Amongst the lesser known authors chosen are Molly Keane, Tobias Wolff – perhaps the modern epitome of the writer’s writer – and William Goldman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter who adapted his own novel, The Princess Bride, for a film which remains one of the most memorable family films in the eighties.

Your can check out the full selections, and the authors’ reasons for choosing them, at your local Borders.

Orange longlist features Nobel Laureate

The longlist for the Orange Broadband for Fiction, the literary award established by Kate Mosse in 1996 to reward fiction written by women, has been announced.

Two Pulitzer Prize winners have made the cut, Marilynne Robinson and Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, and are amongst the record nine American writers in contention.

Two books which made it as far as the longlist stage for the last Man Booker Prize are included: Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog and debutante Gaynor Taylor’s Girl in a Blue Dress, a fictional account of Charles Dicken’s philanderings.

Amongst the other authors shortlisted are Dierdre Madden, who was previously shortlisted for One by One in the Darkness and Lissa Evans, who is best known as a radio and TV producer, with credits including Father Ted, Room 101 and The Kumars at No. 42

Aside from these, Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows and Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife have received many outstanding reviews and might be smart choices for anyone wanting to place a wager.

You can find the full list of twenty books here. The shortlist will be announced on 21st April and the ‘Bessie’ to the winner on 3rd June, with readings by all shortlisted authors at the Queen Elizabeth Hall at London’s Southbank Centre the day before. This event will be hosted by this year’s Chair of Judges, broadcaster Fi Glover, and tickets can be purchased here.

Helen Dunmore’s A Spell Of Winter was the very first winner of the Prize, which has since been awarded to such modern classics as Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces, Andrea Levy’s Small Island and We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver.

Last year’s winner, Rose Tremain, author of The Road Home, is shortlisted for the Nibbie for the Borders Author of the Year. Click here to vote for her or any of the other candidates.

Meyermania reaches new heights

French booksellers are reporting an interesting extra fillip to their sales caused by the popularity of Stephenie Meyer: teenagers are buying copies of Emily Bronte’s classic novel, Wuthering Heights.

In Eclipse, the third book in her Twilight saga, heroine Bella compares her situation – torn between her feelings for vampire Edward and and those for werewolf Jacob – with Catherine Earnshaw’s heartache over Edgar and Heathcliffe. Devoted fans are snapping up the Yorkshire-set classic, although a host of new reviews on Amazon’s French site indicate mixed feelings about a book some found heavy-going.

Many bookshops are now displaying the two books together and the French publisher of Bronte’s book is reporting a year-on-year jump in sales of 50%.

So far, UK bookshops don’t seem to have noticed any effect, but,with fans sharing their thoughts on the many online messageboards devoted to Meyer, it’s probably just a matter of time.

Meyer is up for two awards at the Galaxy British Book Awards, the WHSmith Children’s Book of the Year (for Breaking Dawn) and the Borders Author of the Year. With some commentators dubbing her ‘the new J K Rowling’ and the launch of Breaking Dawn sparking scenes resembling Pottermania, 5th April might well be a night to remember for her.

A chance to meet Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson, author of When Will There Be Good News?, is the star attraction at the third annual Scarborough Literature Festival, which runs from 23rd to the 26th April.

She’s appearing at 3.30pm on Friday 24th and will be interviewed by Peter Guttridge, crime critic of The Observer and a successful crime writer himself.

Atkinson made an instant impact in the book world, winning the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year with her debut, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and has now published six bestselling novels and a collection of short stories.

Other authors appearing in Scarborough include no.1 bestselling thriller writer Lee Child, new crime star Simon Kernick and historian and now historic novelist Alison Weir. Biographer Victoria Glendinning, Poet Laureate candidate Jackie Kay and multiple award-winning children’s writer Anne Fine are amongst the other attractions at one of the UK’s fastest growing literary festivals.

Tickets for this, and all the events, can be bought by calling 01723 372075. Further details of the programme can be found here. 

And click on the Best Read tab at the top to let us know what you thought of Kate’s book or any of the other nine choices in Richard & Judy’s latest Book Club.