Newsletter: April 2009

Loads of prize news this month. So take a deep breath and get ready to be updated...

First off, much-admired poet Seamus Heaney won the £40,000 David Cohen Prize, a biennial award which honours outstanding achievement in literature. Andrew Motion, chair of the judges, said 'The self-renewing force of his writing, and the sheer scale of his achievement make the award of the Cohen Prize an absolutely right and proper act of recognition.' The prize also included £12,500 which could be donated to an organisation encouraging young writers, or to an individual young writer. Heaney opted to donate the money to an annual poetry speaking competition in Ireland, Poetry Aloud.

Atthe other end of the poetry spectrum, relative newcomer Christopher James won the National Poetry Competition with what The Guardian calls his 'wryly affectionate poem about a funeral'. 'Farewell to the Earth', was chosen by judges Brian Patten, Frieda Hughes and Jack Mapanje to win the £5,000 prize.

Onto fiction now, and Youssef Ziedan's Beelzebub, set in fifth-century Egypt and Syria and dealing with the early history of Christianity, was announced as the winner of the $60,000 International Prize for Arabic Fiction - known as the 'Arabic Booker'.

Meanwhile the winner of this year's Blue Peter Book Award is Matt Haig. Chosen by children for children, a panel of eight child judges have named Shadow Forest - a dark and grisly tale about two orphans and a forest full of one-eyed trolls - as the winner. It sounds good to me.

And just in case you missed it, Natasha Mostert's book The Season of the Witch wasmnamed the winner of World Book Day's 'The Book to Talk About' 2009 after winning 25% of the public vote. Mostert won £5,000 which she donated to charity.

The winners of the regional heats of the Commonwealth Writer's Prize have been announced. They are, in the 'best book' category: Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth; Mandla Langa, The Lost Colours of the Chameleon; Marina Endicott, Good to a Fault; and Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap. And in the 'best first book' category: Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes; Uwem Akpan, Say You're One of Them; Joan Thomas, Reading by Lightning; and Mo Zhi Hong, The Year of the Shanghai Shark. All the winners receive £1,000, and now go on to contest the overall Commonwealth best book and best first book prizes, worth £10,000 and £5,000 respectively. The winners will be announced on 16th May.

Another prize to watch out for in coming months is the Orwell Prize, celebrating the best in political writing. We now know that this year's shortlisted books are: Fishing in Utopia by Andrew Brown; Reappraisals by Tony Judt; Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews; Chinese Whispers by Hsiao-Hung Pai; Descent Into Chaos by Ahmed Rashid; and The White War by Mark Thompson.

But I can't leave you without mentioning one of the literary world's mostly eagerly anticipated awards, the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. This year the coveted honour has been scooped by - wait for it - The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-miligram Containers of Fromage Frais by Professor Philip M. Parker. I kid you not.

Susan Tranter

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