Newsletter: May 2005

Hello everyone - here's this month's round-up of book news from the UK.

The shortlist for the Orange Fiction Prize has been announced, and features quite a few new names:

Billie Morgan by Joolz Denby

Old Filth by Jane Gardam

The Mammoth Cheese by Sheri Holman

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka

Liars and Saints by Maile Meloy

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

If you've read any of these titles and would like to comment, why not send in your thoughts to our Orange Prize discussion board?

Publisher Macmillan has been in the news in the UK over its plans to launch a 'cut price' new fiction line. The 'cut price' doesn't mean discounted books for readers though - it means paying no advances to first-time authors, and making them pay their own editing costs. In return for having their book taken on, authors will receive larger-than-usual royalties of 20%. Published writers and figures from the UK industry however, have been complaining that the scheme takes advantage of inexperienced authors.

Also attracting a smattering of controversy was the British Council's own New Writing anthology, the latest edition of which (number 13) has been edited by Toby Litt and Ali Smith. In their introduction, Smith and Litt admitted they had found the unsolicited submissions from women writers to be 'disappointingly domestic'. This sparked upset from people who thought domesticity as a subject or a setting was being criticised - but Litt and Smith were quick to point out, in a letter to The Guardian, that it was rather 'the lack of risk-taking in the writing itself' which they had a problem with. Find out more about the anthology which includes work by John Berger, Jackie Kay, Edwin Morgan, Fay Weldon and Don Paterson.

And finally, Dan 'Da Vinci Code' Brown's grip on the British reading public continues unabated. During the last week of April, Brown had four out of the top five books in the Nielsen Bookscan bestseller list.

Susan Tranter

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