Newsletter: November 2007

October is inevitably much taken up with hype about the Man Booker Prize, and so it proved again this year. Against all the odds, and seeing off competition from punters' and bookies' favourites Ian McEwan and Lloyd Jones, Anne Enright (below) took the award for what The Guardian called 'a novel of exhilarating bleakness', The Gathering. Fending off criticism that the book is heavy-going and downright gloomy, Howard Davies, chair of the panel, said: 'It's accessible. It's somewhat bitter - but it's perfectly accessible. People will be pretty excited by it when they read it.' Find out more.

 Photo: The Times

Meanwhile Sean O'Brien (below) pulled off a pretty impressive prize win of his own when he was awarded the prestigious Forward Prize for Poetry for a record third time. His collection The Drowned Book is our Book of the Month on EnCompass, and Sean is taking part in one of our Author Interviews too (if you're reading this before 6th November you still have time to submit a question via our discussion boards). Find out more about O'Brien's win.

 Photo: Caroline Forbes

And one more prize before we move on: Marcus Sedgwick's My Swordhand is Singing, a sinister tale of vampires in seventeenth-century Romania, has just won the Booktrust Teenage Fiction prize. Find out more.

Political biographies haven't been selling well in the UK recently, but there was no shortage of publishers queuing up to sign Tony Blair's memoirs earlier in October. Despite worries about the former prime minister being more concerned wth asserting his place in history than offering a true 'how it was' insight, and despite fears that Cherie Blair's memoirs, due out next year, will steal Tony's thunder, a deal was struck. Random House beat off the competition to secure the book for £4.6m. Which sounds a lot until you know that the Blair camp were apparently hoping for closer to £7m. Find out more about the bidding.

Another unhappy writer is J.K. Rowling, who's been incensed to discover that an independent American publisher was aiming to launch an unauthorised 'Harry Potter lexicon'. It turns out Ms Rowling was planning the same thing herself - only she'll be donating the profits to charity. Author and film studio are currently pursuing legal action to stop the publication by RDR Books. Find out more. Ms Rowling's stock continues to rise, however: recently a rare and apparently very collectable first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was sold at auction for a record-breaking £19,700. Read more.

The Persian-born, South African-raised, London-based writer Doris Lessing caused controversy this month when she commented that the September 11th attacks in the Unites States were not as terrible as the terrorist campaign waged by the IRA. I doubt there'd have been much fuss at all though, if she hadn't just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The final word this month must go to Lessing, who's response on learning that she'd won the Nobel Prize for Literature - 'Oh Christ' - has become a minor YouTube favourite.

  Photo: Ingrid van Kruse

 Susan Tranter

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