Newsletter: February 2006

Greetings everyone, and thanks for checking in with EnCompass. If you're anything like me, you read more at this time of year (when it's too dark and cold to go out) than during the summer, so if you're looking for recommendations, you've come to the right place! A good place to start is with my Book of the Month choice for February - Old Filth by Jane Gardam, a cracking story of a fascinating fictional life.

So, what's been happening on the UK literary scene lately? Well, the literary calendar swings into action pretty quickly here, with some of the first major prizes awarded already. Hilary Spurling won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award with the second part of her monumental biography of Matisse, Matisse the Master. The category winners were: The Accidental by Ali Smith (Novel); The Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw (First Novel); Matisse the Master by Hilary Spurling (Biography); Cold Calls by Christopher Logue (Poetry); and The New Policeman by Kate Thompson (Children’s Book). To find out more, go to the Whitbread Book Awards website. Also, in one of poetry's most prestigious awards, Carol Ann Duffy won the £10,000 TS Eliot poetry prize with her latest collection, Rapture. 

Incidentally, if you want to have a hand in securing a literary prize, rather than just waiting to see what a panel of judges think, then you have until the end of this month to get your votes in for The Big Gay Read. This campaign to find the nation's favourite lesbian and gay novel has been running lots of high profile events, and garnering plenty of reader power. Find out more - and cast your vote - by going to the Big Gay Read website.

In order to secure themselves some of the lucrative prize-winning authors of the future, several UK literary agencies have launched prizes recently targeting students on creative writing courses. Mulcahey & Viney are working with the University of Manchester, and Curtis Brown (one of the biggest agencies) is tempting students on the University of East Anglia's prestigious MA course. If they succeed in finding any superstars of the future, the prize money will have been well spent.

Meanwhile Jacqueline Wilson, the UK Children's Laureate, has put her energy behind a campaign to encourage reading aloud to children. She believes children 'become hooked on books because they are read to, and learn to love books'. She's encouraged her publisher, Random House, to produce a guide to Great Books to Read Aloud, featuring endorsements from celebrity parents including Cherie Blair and Philip Pullman.

That's all for this month. Check out the discussion taking place on our forums, and keep sending in your reviews. And, of course, keep reading!

Best wishes,

Susan 

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