Newsletter: May 2009

Sadly we lost novelist and short story writer JG Ballard last month. Ballard - author of Crash and The Empire of the Sun - died aged 78, after a long battle with cancer. Find out more.

Margaret Drabble announced that she's no longer planning to write fiction because she fears repeating herself. 'You don't really want to start doing that in novels, when somebody can say hmm, you wrote that in 1972,' she said. Find out more.

(Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez angrily denied rumours that he has stopped writing. 'I do nothing else but write,' said the Nobel laureate. His most recent book appeared in 1994 and speculation has been rife that it would be the magic realist's final publication. Find out more.)

The town of Wincanton in Somerset named several new streets after Terry Pratchett's Discworld series of fantasy novels. Peace Pie Street and Treacle Mine Road are among the names which were chosen from a shortlist by local residents. Clearly a place full of fantasy fans, back in 2002 the town became the first to twin with a fictional place - Pratchett's city of Ankh-Morpork. Find out more.

 
Bookselling is now becoming the stuff of fantasy to some. Readers now have another ingenious way of getting their hands on a hard-to-find book - using the new Espresso book machine which opened at Blackwell's on Charing Cross Road in London. The £68,000 machine (one of only three currently in operation) enables customers to print on demand their choice of some 400,000 titles, including many out-of-print titles. Pages are printed, and the book bound, in a mere matter of minutes. Find out more.

Turning now to literary awards...

The British Book Awards were distributed at a glitzy London ceremony. The following titles scooped prizes:

Galaxy Book of the Year: The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale 
Outstanding Achievement: Michael Palin
Richard & Judy Best Read: When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
Borders Author of the Year: Aravind Adiga for The White Tiger
Tesco Biography of the Year: Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama
Books Direct Crime Thriller of the Year: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson 
Sainsbury's Popular Fiction Award: Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks
Play.com Popular Non-Fiction Award: The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale 
Waterstone's New Writer of the Year: Tom Rob Smith for Child 44

WHSmith Children's Book of the Year: Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer.

Find out more.

And this year's Orwell Prizes, celebrating the best in political writing, were also announced, the winners being:

Book Prize: Andrew Brown for Fishing in Utopia
Journalism Prize: Patrick Cockburn for London Review of Books and The Independent
Special Prize for Blogs: Jack Night wins for NightJack - An English Detective.

Find out more.

The winners of the 2009 Christopher Tower Poetry Prize, the UK’s most prestigious award for 16 to 18 year old aspiring poets, were also announced. Seventeen-year old Timothy Carson from Belfast was awarded the £3,000 first prize for his poem, 'Is Life Likely?' Winner of the second (£1000) prize is Iona Twiston-Davies from Oxford with 'Grey Mile', and the third prizewinner (£500) is Paul Merchant from Kent with his poem, 'Three Guesses'. The prizewinners’ schools each receive £150.

Find out more.

(While we're on the subject of prizewinners, in case you missed it, over the pond Elizabeth Strout won this year's Pulitzer Prize for fiction with her collection of linked short stories, Olive Kitteridge. Find out more.)

Meanwhile the judges and shortlisters have been just as busy, with the following prizes all announcing shortlists to choose from in the coming months...

The prestigious Carnegie Medal for children's writing:

Kevin Brooks, Black Rabbit Summer

Eoin Colfer, Airman

Frank Cottrell Boyce, Cosmic

Siobhan Dowd, Bog Child

Keith Gray, Ostrich Boys

Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go

Kate Thompson, Creature of the Night.

Find out more.

The Orange Prize for Fiction:

Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman

The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey

The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt

Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden

Home by Marilynne Robinson

Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie.

Find out more.

The Orange Award for New Writers:

An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay
Miles From Nowhere by Nami Mun

The Personal History of Rachel DuPree by Ann Weisgarber.

Find out more.

The inaugural David Gemmell Fantasy Award:

Joe Abercrombie's Last Argument of Kings
Juliet Marillier's Heir to Sevenwaters
Brandon Sanderson's The Hero of Ages
Andrzej Sapkowski's Blood of Elves
Brent Weeks's The Way of Shadows.

Find out more.

The Desmond Elliott Prize for new writers:

A Girl Made of Dust by Nathalie Abi-Ezzi 
The Behaviour of Moths by Poppy Adams 
Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold 
Mr Toppit by Charles Elton 
Never Never by David Gaffney 
Blackmoor by Edward Hogan 
The Redemption of Alexander Seaton by Shona MacLean 
The Rescue Man by Anthony Quinn 
Little Gods by Anna Richards 
The Alternative Hero by Tim Thornton. 

Find out more.

As usual, we'll be keeping you up to date with who wins these and other awards, so keep visiting EnCompass to keep in touch. Even better, why not subscribe to our RSS feed? Just click the orange RSS icon on the homepage and you're sorted.

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