Newsletter: January 2007

Greetings everyone, and Happy New Year.

December was, as usual, a pretty hectic month for the UK book world. In the run-up to Christmas (AKA the Silly Season), the titles riding high in the annual book-buying splurge were The Sound of Laughter by comedian Peter Kay, The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden, and a curious paperback called Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze?. Why indeed.

Here's a quick round-up of other newsworthy items from the last four weeks or so...

Lord Voldemort is apparently the odds-on favourite to kill off Harry Potter in the final instalment of J.K. Rowling's hugely popular series. The revelation from bookmakers William Hill came just days after the seventh book about the boy wizard was revealed to be titled Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Sounds pretty ominous to me.

The news of a forthcoming Potterfest will no doubt come as a huge relief to the books' publishers, Bloomsbury, who were forced to issue a profit warning earlier in December because there has not been a new cash-boosting instalment of the book this year. According to The Guardian, the company blamed 'a poor run-up to Christmas and problems selling electronic rights to some of its reference titles'.

John Heath-Stubbs, holder of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and renowned as a defiantly classical poet in a generation of modernists, died of cancer on Boxing Day, aged 88. View Heath-Stubbs' page on the Poetry Archive.

Whatever the season, there are prizes to be won, and December was no exception. The Diamond of Drury Lane, a debut novel by Julia Golding, won this year's Nestle Children's Book prize.

And this year's Guardian First Book Award, designed to celebrate the finest new literary talent, was won by Yiyun Li for her collection of short stories set in and around China, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. I've just borrowed it from my library, so I'll let you know what I think soon.

Susan Tranter

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