Newsletter: June 2009

The last month has been book-ended by two major stories which shine rather different lights on UK literary life. On 1st May Carol Ann Duffy was officially named the next Poet Laureate, the first woman and the first openly gay person to hold the position. All of which was generally felt to be a good thing and high time.

But towards the end of the month literary news was dominated by the almighty hoo-hah surrounding the election of a new Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. It looked like being a fairly interesting contest, with Derek Walcott perhaps just slightly ahead of Ruth Padel, until evidence came to light of harassment allegations against Walcott which had been made many years ago by a student at Harvard. Walcott stepped down amid claims of a 'smear campaign', leaving Padel the only serious contender. She was duly elected, but after only nine days in post, resigned when it cam to light that she had had a hand in forwarding information about the harssment affair to journalists. Padel denied wanting to smear Walcott's campaign, but admitted that she had acted 'unwisely'. The whole affair has potentially damaged the reputations of both writers, and left Oxford with no-one to fill its Poetry Chair.

Ah well. Onto more heartening news. Canadian short story writer Alice Munro (much enthused about on this website) won what was billed as a clash of the world's literary giants to take the £60,000 Man Booker international prize. The 77-year-old was picked from a line-up of towering international talent including the Peruvian writer Mario ­Vargas Llosa, the Nobel laureate VS Naipaul, Australia's Peter Carey and the Booker prize-winning Scottish author James Kelman. Hurrah!

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Christos Tsiolkas picked up the £10,000 Commonwealth Writers Prize with his novel The Slap (much enthused about, albeit in anticipation, on our blog). Hurrah!

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Cormac McCarthy, acclaimed author of The Road and No Country For Old Men (and finally being much enthused about by lots of people), was given a lifetime achievement award from writers' organisation PEN. The $25,000 (£16,600) biennial PEN/Saul Bellow award goes to an American fiction writer whose work 'possesses qualities of excellence, ambition, and scale of achievement over a sustained career which place him or her in the highest rank of American literature'.

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And finally The Armies by Evelio Rosero, translated by Anne McLean, won this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The story is set in Colombia during the civil war. (I can't enthuse about this one because I haven't read it yet - but I'm sure it's very deserving.)

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Susan Tranter

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