Non-Fiction Award Wind-up

Over the last 3 days, three major non-fiction awards have been handed out: the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, and the Governor General's Literary Awards. The winners are:

Samuel Johnson Prize Winner

Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize Winner

Governor General's Literary Award Winner

The Guardian writes that Davis's book "puts the three attempts to climb Everest, between 1921 and 1924, into the context of the first world war: most of the 23 climbers had seen action, including Mallory, and Davis explores how the yearning to conquer the mountain was partly a response to the atrocities of the previous decade."

Savage's book "is a personal narrative that addresses the violent history of the Cypress Hills region of eastern Saskatchewan, where Savage lives part of the year. The jury’s citation describes A Geography of Blood as 'a haunting meditation on time and place' and 'a part memoir, part history, part geological survey, part lament, part condemnation of the accepted myth of the settlement of the Western Plains,'" according to Quill & Quire.

King, also from Saskatchewan, awed the GG prize jury: "Leonardo and the Last Supper is a combination of brilliant storytelling and superlative writing. Ross King portrays the towering genius of Leonardo in a way that will engage experts and delight a general audience. Impeccable research delivered with a novelist’s panache."

Read more about the respective awards at The Guardian, Quill & Quire, and CBC News.

Guardian First Book Award Nominees Announced

Earlier this week, The Guardian announced the shortlist for its 2012 First Book Award. There are three fiction titles and two non-fiction; as well, 3 American authors made the list: Kevin Powers for The Yellow Birds, Katherine Boo for Behind The Beautiful Forevers and Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding, a personal favourite of mine (it's in my top ten!). I am rooting for Harbach, obviously, but a book about baseball and Moby-Dick may not have the same impact in the British Isles. We shall see.

Rounding out the list are Scottish writer Kerry Hudson with Tony Hogan Bought Me An Ice Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma, and Lindsey Hilsum's "non-fiction account of the Libyan revolution," Sandstorm.

"It's a very strong list this year," said Allardice, who is joined on the judging panel by authors Ahdaf Soueif, Kate Summerscale, William Dalrymple and Jeanette Winterson, and Guardian deputy editor, Katharine Viner. "We've got a fictional account of the war in Iraq, and a fictional account of growing up in poverty in the UK, alongside non-fictional accounts of growing up in a Mumbai slum, and the conflict in Libya. It's very interesting to see the different ways writers choose to approach their material. The Mumbai book reads almost like a novel, Boo is so deeply embedded in her environment, while Kevin Powers has chosen to fictionalise his obviously first-hand and deeply personal experience of serving in Iraq. It's a very raw book in subject matter and in some places in style, but the powerful authenticity of such a harrowing experience really comes across."

The winner will be announced on November 29th.

Good News About the Orange

One of my favourite literary prizes is - or was - the Orange Prize for Fiction. It's not that I don't like the award anymore, it's that Orange, a mobile phone company, pulled its sponsorship last year. 2012's winner Madeline Miller will be the last winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction. However, private donors have saved the award for 2013. It is rebranded the Women's Prize for Fiction, its original title before Orange stepped in, and will hopefully have a corporate sponsor for 2014. Good news for award buffs!

Read The Guardian's article about the award here.

2012 Man Booker Prize Announced

Today, Hilary Mantel was awarded the 2012 Man Booker Prize for her book Bring Up the Bodies, a sequel to the 2009 Booker-winning Wolf Hall. She was the favourite to win the award at 6/4 odds; it is "the third time in eight years that the favorite has won the award (Wolf Hall was one of the others)." The win marks two other milestones: "Not only does Hilary Mantel become the first British novelist and the first woman to win the prize twice, she is also the first writer to win double glory with a sequel."

This year's Booker contest sparked a debate about readability and popular fiction winning the award; the chair of the prize, Sir Peter Stothard, previously ruffled feathers with his stodgy opinion on bloggers and literary criticism, while simultaneously stating that the Man Booker should not be defined by "readability." It is interesting, then, that the prohibitive favourite and previous winner should win the award. For all its talk of challenging readers and selecting lasting titles, the Prize committee chooses the most obvious novel. The Guardian has a similar opinion:

"The other novels on the shortlist could never be so popular. Deborah Levy's Freudian tale of madness among the middle classes, Jeet Thayil's brilliantly rambling stories of druggy Bombay, Tan Twan Eng's exploration of atrocity and artistry, Alison Moore's slow-burning portrait of a man in flight from his past: Mantel's is, literally and metaphorically, a weightier book than these. 

"But Mantel's real challenger on the shortlist, and the novel that has missed out to her double coronation, must have been Will Self's Umbrella. An undeniably daunting slab of high modernist prose, without such concessions as speech marks or paragraph breaks, it's also a brilliantly absorbing and audacious meditation on madness, consciousness, technology, war and the mess of the 20th century.

"As a highbrow panel dropped the previous year's demands for "readability" in favour of complexity and the sheer pleasures of innovative prose, it looked for a while as though it could have been Self's year. As it is, perhaps Umbrella would have been too radical a choice for a prize that, as the country's biggest, cannot help but be a little conservative."

For another year, the Booker Prize offers lively debate about literature, literary critics, and readers. Whether you agree with the selection or not, you can't argue about keeping great literature in the spotlight. Now the watch begins for next year!

Bloggers vs. Critics

Every once in a while, the debate comes up that blogging is going to be the death of literary criticism. With the incredible dearth of book-type blogs in existence, it is an inevitable comparison. As a book blogger myself, I have no delusions of grandeur regarding my reviews. They are for me, and for those who have decided that we enjoy similar books. I am the same: I follow bloggers who have proven to me that his or her tastes are in line with my own. If not, well, it doesn't really matter what the opinion is, does it?

Now, if I seek out information about a specific book, say, Telegraph Road, I will read review sites that I feel will give me objective, thoughtful information regarding the title. I may not base my decision on a casual reviewer with a blog, but I might on what Jennifer Egan thinks.

That is my decision to make. I take it seriously, and if a reviewer (or blogger) is wrong, well, it's a difference of opinion. Books are seldom the same thing to everybody (if ever). Anyone who thinks they can quantify a book's quality clearly has a high opinion of himself/herself.

For instance, I recently read a review of Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter, a book I enjoyed and read very quickly. Now, the author of the review did not enjoy it as much as I did, if at all:

So Beautiful Ruins is a bunch of stereotypes on top of a pile of clichés. While reading, I kept a running count of all the original thoughts and authentic feelings that are contained in Beautiful Ruins. The final count was zero.

It's true, the novel contained several characters that were either underdeveloped or unnecessary to the plot. Even the main characters acted in a cliched fashion. I admit that - despite this, I enjoyed it. Walter's prose is excellent, the story moves quickly and is engaging, and the settings are picturesque. What's not to like?

Now, however, Sir Peter Stothard, the editor of the Times Literary Supplement and the chair of this year's Man Booker Prize judges, decides that book bloggers are going to ruin "good" literature with amateur reviews:

It will be bad for readers; as much as one would like to think that many bloggers opinions are as good as others. It just ain't so. People will be encouraged to buy and read books that are no good, the good will be overwhelmed, and we'll be worse off. There are some important issues here. 

Apparently, book bloggers are such persuasive writers that their opinions will determine the buying habits of the masses - pretty good for amateur critics, right? Not only does his argument make very little sense, it is presuming that readers of "good" literature need to be told what to read. If the readers of "good" literature are that gullible, they would not be able to understand what they were reading (have you heard of Will Self yet?).

But why does he bother at all? He argues for good literature but, as a publisher and author himself, he must realize that book sales drive the book industry; without an annual Fifty Shades of Grey there would be no Zadie Smith. He should be thanking those millions of book buyers around the globe who invest in the printed word so that he can read those pieces of fiction he deems excellent. I suppose I agree with Amanda Nelson at Book Riot, who writes,

Sir Peter’s myopic elitism is so tired and recycled that it’s easy to dismiss. You can feel his fingers grasping for the state of literature as he knows it, desperate to keep it out of the hands of the unwashed masses (you know, those folks who actually read the books).

Her opinion is very funny and much angrier than my own, as Sir Peter's claims for proper critics has an implied gender element, as he is "Of The Greying Hair and Smug Expression." However, our opinions arrive at the same conclusion: why bother?

The Man Booker Prize Shortlist Announced

photo from cbc.ca

The second shortlist to be announced within a week is for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. The list is as follows:

Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists
Deborah Levy, Swimming Home
Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies
Alison Moore, The Lighthouse
Will Self, Umbrella
Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

No Canadians on this list, unfortunately. As with the longlist announcement, Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies is the prohibitive favourite. Last year’s winner, Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, came with a bit of controversy, as the “jury was accused of dumbing down after the chair of the panel said finalists had been chosen for ‘readability’’’ (CBC Books). This year’s list is “more adventurous” with a debut novel from Thayil, a stream of consciousness novel from Self, and two novels, from Levy and Eng, that were previously rejected from British publishers.

It is an interesting list and I will do my best to get through it before the October 16th announcement. However, having not yet read Wolf Hall (gasp), I won’t be able to read Bring Up the Bodies - it is a proper sequel.

Below is a list of other sites reporting on the announcement:

The Man Booker Prize
CBC Books
The Guardian
Page Views
The Millions
The Mookse and the Gripes