Edge Hill Prize long list

It's that time of year again - the longlist is announced for the Edge Hill prize for a single-author collection of stories. This year my own book Used to Be, is on the list - a massive list, and there's huge competition, with some big hitters in the short-story world there, including Colum McCann and Kate Clanchy, two of my favourite writers. And a good proportion of Irish and Scottish writers.

Crossposted to my author blog.

Young Writer of the Year Award

Writing, and promotion of my new book, may have been keeping me away from this blog lately but yesterday I attended an event for bloggers which has brought me right back. The Sunday Times and literary agents Peters Fraser and Dunlop kindly invited us to meet the writers shortlisted for The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award, and it was a very enjoyable and interesting afternoon which raised some key questions about the promotion and nurturing of young writers at the starts of their careers.

Begun in 1991 but temporarily discontinued since 2009, the newly-rejuvenated award, administered by the Society of Authors, is for a full-length book by a UK or Irish writer between the ages of 18 and 35. It boasts among its previous winners such luminaries as Helen Simpson (the first winner), Caryl Phillips, Paul Farley and Zadie Smith, a record justifiably prompting the prize's reinstatement, prime movers of which were Andrew Holgate, literary editor of The Sunday Times and PFD's Caroline Michel. Judges this year were Andrew Holgate, Chief Fiction Reviewer Peter Kemp, and previous winner Sarah Waters.

The prize is for a book of either fiction or non-fiction, extended this year to include Irish, self-published and digital books. Andrew Holgate explained that it is avowedly literary in intent, and the shortlist bears this out, consisting of three literary novels and a book of poetry - no non-fiction makes the cut this year as sufficiently literary in character.

The Year of the Runaways (Picador) by Sunjeev Sahota (above), which was also shortlisted for this year's Man Booker, is a huge sweeping novel following the individual progress of each of four young characters who have had to leave India for Britain (I think he said four: I'm only a third of the way through the novel and so far three have been dealt with in detail). It is Sunjeev's second novel, but the other three books on the shortlist are debuts: Ben Fergusson's Betty-Trask- and HWA-Debut-Award-winning The Spring of Kasper Meier (Little, Brown) set in Berlin immediately after WWII, Sara Taylor's The Shore (Heinemann), a multi-viewpoint fiction charting a community on the rural coast of Virginia, which is being shortlisted just about everywhere (Bailey's Prize, Guardian First Book Award), and Loop of Jade, Sarah Howe's collection of poems exploring her dual British-Chinese heritage, which has garnered shortlistings in the T S Eliot and Forward First Collection prizes.

I would say that all of these books have a kind of literary ease that amply qualifies them for this shortlisting - each of the authors is wonderfully at home in the language, each has a sharp and original eye and accurate feel for our physical world and a psychological acuity, and each is powered by a deep moral sense. (You could tell that last anyway; they were such nice people!) (I've begun all of the books - for this event I broke my general rule of reading only one book at a time in order to give it its due attention, and it's a testament to these books that they're all nevertheless very individual and vivid in my mind.) Pick up any one of these four books and you know you're in the hands of a born writer - proved, perhaps, by the fact that Sunjeev confirmed the rumour that he hadn't read a novel until he picked up Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children at the age of, I think, eighteen.

But what happens to a born literary writer in a culture hellbent on the commercial and on fetishising the Next New Thing, in which authors are routinely dropped after non-mega-selling debuts? It's a question, I think, at the heart of this prize. No doubt there will be accusations that, as a prize for young writers, it's contributing to the cult of youth, but I think its serious literary purpose runs counter to that, designed as it is to give status, exposure and encouragement to young writers writing into our culture through its squeezed literary end. Not, though, that one of these books fails to be exciting and engrossing.

In connection with this, after excellent readings by the authors, Andrew Holgate, chairing the Q & A, asked all four writers about the question of risk involved in the writing of their novels. It has to be said that all four books were published by mainstream publishers, and that none - with the exception perhaps of Sarah Howe's poetry collection - begins with the kind of unfamiliarity of language or tone that would frighten the horses. However, as he pointed out, Sunjeev goes on to create fundamental temporal shifts - we constantly move back in time to the earlier histories of the characters, slowly discovering how they are in the situation at the start of the novel - and in particular with the refusal to explain the Indian words his characters use all the time, expecting the reader to elucidate from the context, or, as Sunjeev put it, to just accept it as part of the music of the novel. Sara Taylor, Andrew Holgate suggested, takes similar risks with time, and with her multi-viewpoint narrative (although she replied that she was surprised it was seen as 'risk': to her the writing of it was simply fun). Sarah Howe's book is striking for its wide range of forms, unusual in a poetry collection, raging from pieces that are more or less prose poems (she called them 'prose') to entirely lyrical verse. Ben Fergusson takes the striking decision to eschew the usual youthful tenor of gay literature and portray a middle-aged man blackmailed for his homosexuality (and very gripping it is).

My writing and blogging colleague Dan Holloway asked if any of the four had however felt any brake on them as beginners. Did they have any sense that it would be only later, once they were established, that they would truly be able to write what they wanted in the way that they wanted? Ben said he simply didn't think about expectations, and Sarah Howe said that she had never even thought of an audience when she sat down to write her poems, it had been an entirely private enterprise, and - interestingly - she now finds it weird to think that that there are things in her poems that she wouldn't even discuss with her family but which other people, strangers, are now reading. Sunjeev, the only one shortlisted with a second book, said that when he wrote it he did have to think about marketing, simply because he'd been through the process with his first book. However, he felt that, although he was indeed reacting to his first book in writing his second, it was more a question of reacting against himself and developing.* Perhaps inevitably for someone whose PhD is in censorship in the production of American first novels, Sara Taylor made clear that in writing her time-shifting multi-viewpoint book she was strongly reacting against cultural expectations, and the only limitation she felt was that of not wanting to reveal family secrets, a sentiment that Sarah Howe echoed, if I remember rightly. It was clear, however, that some of the four had, since writing their books, experienced the negative pressures of marketing: earlier, as we mingled, Sara Taylor had talked about the fact that she likes to call her book a 'fractured narrative', but had been made aware that in marketing terms the phrase had negative connotations, and there was a potential pigeon-holing problem in retailing terms for a book which has been referred to as both a novel and a collection of linked stories. For Sara herself that liminal quality is a strength, and Dan and I heartily agreed with her - and it's excellent that prize judges are rewarding her for it.

It was a thought-provoking and very enjoyable afternoon, and a privilege to be able to meet and talk to the authors and the prize organisers, and I thank them.

(I'm afraid I didn't get a photo of Sarah Howe reading: I was so engrossed in her mesmerising reading that I forgot, but she's there in the background of the photos of the others reading.)

A week tomorrow - the evening of Monday 23rd - some of the shortlisted authors and previous winners including Helen Simpson will be reading and speaking at Foyle's. Do go if you can - I would if I could! (Beer and pizza too, apparently!) Details here.

* Dan Holloway points out to me that in answer to his question, Sunjeev also said that he would never have felt able to write such a long and complex book the first time around as he wasn't ready. I missed Sunjeev actually saying that, and it's a crucial point. As Dan says: 'Yet he clearly was ready enough as a writer to be published. Which further emphasizes what we talked about afterwards - that it is so important for new writers to be given space, to know that they will be given several books in which to discover their voices before being dropped.' (Thank you, Dan.)

Women's Prize for Fiction

Huge congratulations to A M Homes for winning the Women's Prize for Fiction for May We Be Forgiven, her hilarious, stomach-churning yet moving depiction of the implosion of the American Dream via the disintegrating life of a hapless historian trying to rehabilitate the reputation of Richard Nixon.

Homes is that really precious thing, most particularly in this age of fearful sensibilities: a writer who dares to break the false boundaries of taste and accepted sentiment in order to explore the complex, sordid yet touching truth about ourselves. There seems to me in Homes's writing a total lack of authorial timidity or self-regard, and I salute her.

In the (just less than) fortnight run-up to the prize I set out to read all of the shortlisted books and I managed them all except Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, of which I've only read a quarter. The thing that struck me most strongly was a transatlantic divide: three of the shortlistees were American and three British, and I found a literary-cultural difference in their books. It's often said that British literature is obsessed with the past, and it isn't only the UK Mantel's straightforwardly historical novel that seems to bear this out. British Kate Atkinson's structural tour-de-force, Life After Life,  is essentially about the horrors of war and plays with the thoroughly contemporary astro-physics notion of parallel universes and alternative lives; however, her focus is historical and the book pivots on a moment in 1910 when the protagonist is born into a Forsterian middle-class idyll about to be shattered by war. While the pivotal moment of Zadie Smith's NW is contemporary, an explicit theme is that of time, and much of the narrative is retrospective examination of how the characters got to the point where they are now.

It's not that the American writers aren't interested in history - Homes's protagonist is after all a historian - but what characterises all three are energetic plunges into the here and now to which history has led us, and a muscular facing up to the huge changes we are undergoing. Both Homes's novel and Maria Semple's very clever and entertaining yet moving Where D'You Go, Bernadette, are steeped in the technology that does indeed saturate our world, and capture the way that it is changing not only the texture of our lives but our psyches. Most urgent is Barbara Kingsolver's stunning Flight Behaviour, set in a place, America's rural bible belt, where climate change is seen as 'God's will' yet is most dramatically experienced.

A great shortlist, and great evidence of the strength of women's writing on both sides of the Atlantic.

A Prize Change?

I'm a bit behind with this, but I'd like to note here the interesting list of finalists for the International Man Booker, and the official statement which is a declaration of fulfilled intention to reverse a tradition:

The previous incarnations of the prize have included a large cluster of well-known and indeed expected names, from Doris Lessing and Milan Kundera to Amos Oz and Joyce Carol Oates. There is, however, nothing familiar or expected about the list unveiled today.

The statement points out that the list (below) includes only two well-known names and quotes the prize administrator as saying that the judges were chosen, and a larger number appointed than previously, in order to allow the panel "to read in far greater depth than ever before.”
This is presented as such an innovation that it's wearying confirmation that our prize culture relies too heavily on the known and approved (and so, probably, previously hyped). It would be nice to think, though, that this development - along with the great surprise finds of this year's Booker shortlist - are signs of permanent change.

Here's the list:
U R Ananthamurthy (India), Aharon Appelfeld (Israel), Lydia Davis (USA), Intizar Husain (Pakistan), Yan Lianke (China), Marie NDiaye (France), Josip Novakovich (Canada), Marilynne Robinson (USA), Vladimir Sorokin (Russia) and Peter Stamm (Switzerland).

Women and winning

So the 2013 Costa winners are announced: they are novelist Hilary Mantel, new writer Francesca Segal, poet Kathleen Jamie, graphic memoirists Mary and Bryan Talbot and children's author, Sally Gardner. While Telegraph writer Sameer Rahim cheers the fact that they are all female and wonders if this makes the all-women former Orange prize (which is still looking for a sponsor) redundant, it occurs to your blogger that the fact that he can find their all-female character so noticeable makes the answer no. He also notes that

three of the five Costa winners have male protagonists – evidence, if we needed it, that the authors are pursuing the stories that interest them and do not feel in the slightest inhibited their gender.

Hm. There are some odd implications here. Could there possibly be a hint that stories about men are more interesting than stories about women, even to women writers? That if women work with female protagonists they are somehow being inhibited by their gender? Even (it could follow) that female gender is essentially inhibiting (unless you escape it with a male protagonist?) Is it true that it still is? How many women writers, I wonder, create male protagonists because they know, consciously or unconsciously, that in our culture the male still stands for normal and the female is, well, female and therefore minority? In fact, you know, for this reason it's much simpler (as a woman), I find, to write with a male protagonist. Bring on a female protagonist and right away you're battling with complex issues and barriers both for your protagonist and her way of being in the world and indeed for your book, not least among the barriers being that it it is known that women readers are happy to read about men but male readers are less keen to read about women. (Even the remarkably sensitive men in my reading group still show this tendency to some extent.) Well, it's less hard than it was, I think, but I do reckon it would be really interesting to study the proportions of male and female protagonists in successful and/or prizewinning books by women.

Entertainment culture

At the moment I'm in wild Wales from where the British literary (for want of a better word) scene is looking progressively bizarre and reminiscent of a hall of mirrors. On the one hand we have a panel of Booker judges being avowedly 'literary', passing over names and reputations and concentrating on the books (hooray) (though meanwhile Irvine Welsh at the Edinburgh Book Festival disses the Booker as middle class and colonial), and on the other, the Guardian's Not the Booker, originally set up to challenge, one would have assumed, the very tendencies this year's Booker panel are eschewing, conducting what seems basically a popularity vote, with those authors possessing the gall to rally their mates to vote most likely to end up on the shortlist and those without pretty much guaranteed not to, irrespective of books' merits. (The shortlist turns out to be entirely male: go figure.)


How many people who voted on the Not the Booker had read all of the books on the longlist in the short time time available? How can any vote made without doing so be considered authoritative, and how can any competition run in such a way be considered serious? Ah well, I've read tweets suggesting that we shouldn't  be taking it seriously. It's just a bit of fun, and it gives some books exposure and that's a good thing isn't it? Who cares about the ones who don't get exposure (however good they may be?) Never mind the quality, feel the hype... The trouble is, though, people do take the results of such competitions seriously, and they do have a serious effect on literature and literary production.

And then we come to the new Costa short story competition, in which, it turns out, the shortlist chosen by the judges will be put to public vote. How is an author to decide what to send to such a competition? Once upon a time you simply chose one of your best, most ambitious stories, suiting it perhaps to what you knew of the judges' literary tastes, confident that the criteria would at least be literary. Now you have to consider sending a crowd-pleasing story. But what will make a crowd-pleasing story? One suspects something pretty simple and traditional, or maybe sensationalist. But what kind of demographic is likely to vote? What kind of demographic will the Costa be encouraging to vote? And will they get it right? And how far will the sifters and then the judges have that demographic in mind when they choose? It seems impossible to second-guess all these things. Perhaps then, you may as well just send your best story and hope for the best, in which case the whole thing is more than usually just a lottery. But ah, isn't that what it's all about now, isn't that what we want? An entertainment, lottery culture...

Booker Longlist

Congratulations all on the Booker longlist, and especially to my publisher Salt, for the inclusion of Alison Moore's The Lighthouse, and to the two other small independent publishers on the list, Myrmidon and And Other Stories.

Here's the whole list:

The Yips by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)
The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman (Sceptre)
Philida by André Brink (Harvill Secker)
The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng (Myrmidon Books)
Skios by Michael Frayn (Faber & Faber)
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (Doubleday)
Swimming Home by Deborah Levy (And Other Stories)
Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)
The Lighthouse by Alison Moore (Salt)
Umbrella by Will Self (Bloomsbury)
Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil (Faber & Faber)
Communion Town by Sam Thompson (Fourth Estate)


See here for Justine Jordan's assessment of the list and  here for an article reporting comments by chair of the judges, Peter Stothard. Personally, I'm pretty pleased by Stothard's statement that 'Who published a book, and indeed even the author, is of very little concern to Man Booker judges. We were considering novels not novelists, texts not reputations' and that a key criteria for this year's panel was that 'a text has to reveal more, the more often you read it... We were looking for books that you can make a sustained critical argument about, and when you read them again, you can make a different critical argument.'

Women just have to do men down, don't they?

A little belatedly (I'm busy writing), here's an article on gender bias in the fiction industry, by Joanna Trollope, chair of this year's Fiction Prize for Women (as we must now call it, since Orange have pulled their sponsorship to concentrate on film, and a new sponsor is being sought).

The vicious comments beneath prove her point, I think.

The critic, the artist and the ego

I love the Guardian extract, concerning critics and prizes, from Stephen Sondheim's forthcoming book, Look I Made a Hat. He's pretty much on about the artists's ego, which might seem self-centred,  but it's a serious point that artists and writers need buoyant egos to go on working. Here are the bits I really like:

On critics:

A good critic is someone who recognises and acknowledges the artist's intentions and the work's aspirations, and judges the work by them, not by what his own objectives would have been.

On prizes:

What sours my grapes is the principle of reducing artists to contestants. Competitive awards boost the egos of the winners (until they lose) and damage the egos of the losers (until they win), while feeding the egos of the voters (all the time). Just as there are people who claim to be immune to public criticism, so there are those who claim to be unaffected by being passed over for an award from their supposed peers. But, as in the case of the critic-immune, I've not met any who have convinced me. It isn't so much that you want to be deemed the best; it's more that you don't want to be deemed second best. No matter who the voters are, and whether you accept them as worthy of judging you, winning means they like you more than your competitors.

In conclusion:

...the only meaningful recognition is recognition by your peers or, more accurately, people you consider your peers, and peer recognition is a very personal matter. An artist's peers are other artists, not necessarily in the same field – ie, musicians for musicians, painters for painters – but people who understand what you're trying to do simply because they're trying to do a similar thing.

On the first point, I'd add that a favourable review that nevertheless entirely misses the point of your work can be almost as bad as an unfavourable review - or, well, pretty dismaying. On the second, I'd add that the pernicious thing about prizes is that the also-rans become second-best in the eyes of the public as well as the judges.
On the last, I'd heartily agree, as far as an artist's ego goes, but then we have the matter, don't we, of sales...?

Guardian First Book Award shortlist

The Guardian's move to open up their First Book Award this year to readers' suggestions, in order to catch books not entered, has come up trumps: a book nominated by Guardian readers has now been chosen by judges as one of the final five contenders for the £10,000 prize: Juan Pablo Villalobos's Down the Rabbit Hole from enterprising new independent publisher And Other Stories.

You can read my article  about my own search for missed books, along with my own nominations here on the Guardian books blog.

Four novels and an oncologist's biography of cancer make up the shortlist:

Pigeon English, Stephen Kelman (Bloomsbury)
The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee (Fourth Estate)
Down The Rabbit Hole, Juan Pablo Villalobos (And Other Stories)
The Collaborator, Mirza Waheed (Viking)
The Submission, Amy Waldman (William Heinemann)

Manchester Literature Festival discussion on prize culture

Last night, Booker announcement night, Manchester Literature Festival and Manchester University's Centre for New Writing held a very interesting panel discussion on the subject of Prize Culture, chaired by journalist Michael Taylor, and presenting some very different angles on the subject.

Manchester University literature lecturer Jerome de Groot opened, making it clear that he was approaching the matter as an academic and was interested in (if my notes have it right)  'conceptualising what the Booker Prize has achieved.' He referred to Richard Todd's 1996 study of the Booker,  Consuming Fictions, which argues that the Booker and prize culture in general have created and sustained a market for literary fiction that it might otherwise not have received, that it has enfranchised audiences by taking judgement away from critics and academics and created a modern Booker canon. Though De Groot questioned this last point: how many people in the audience knew who won the first Booker in 1969? No one besides me put up their hand, and I only know because I've been thinking about these things and looking into them. (It was P H Newby for Something to Answer For - and no, I've not read it.) On the whole, though, De Groot was in agreement with Todd that prizes 'create a space for new negotiations of cultural worth'. He thought in addition that they give us an insight into publishing as an industry, allowing us to see the ways that cultural capital is peddled and the way books are sold to us. Above all, it allows us to reflect on what we have allowed publishing to become.

The other four panelists were writer-teachers in the Centre for New Writing, and next came poet Vona Groarke taking a poetry prize perspective. Having been a winner, loser (she said) and judge of poetry prizes, she gave us a blackly funny list of tips for winning which included 'Suffer bereavement or die,' 'If you're not suffering enough be young and beautiful,' and be politically aware but not so much as to frighten the horses. Next she gave us a breakdown of the typical judging panel which included: the villain, ie the panel member who hasn't read the books, usually a celeb; the hung jury which is so split that it's fundamentally incapable of functioning or results in a mediocre acceptable winner; the over-enthusiastic panel member who is incapable of making a detached decision; and the king maker who prizes youth and promise over achievement. This last she saw as a big problem: too many judges want to be in at the beginning of writers' careers; they want to feel that they have found someone. Mostly she felt that decisions end in compromise, and that in order to win, a collection has to be either outstandingly irreproachably wonderful or outstandingly irreproachably mediocre. On the whole, she thought it was astounding that prize juries ever get it right, and acknowledged that sometimes they do.

Novelist M J Hyland, speaking next, commented that Groarke was lucky, as a poet, to be able to speak her mind so freely, and that as a prize-winning novelist she felt less able. She read to us from John McGahern's essay on being shortlisted for the Booker in 1990 in which he relates that he found the razzamatazz far from enjoyable and comments that sometimes it takes years for the worth of a book to be seen, yet the judges need to make a decision in such a short time. My notes got a bit muddled here and I'm not sure whether the following experiences were those of McGahern, or of Hyland herself, both of whom have judged prizes, but I'll repeat them for their interest: no two judges on a panel having the same opinion, and at one stage all rejected books having been admired by someone on the panel while the winner limps into the shortlist unopposed but championed by no one.

Novelist Ian McGuire then spoke briefly but very thoughtfully about literary value judgements and where the power to make them lies now. Noting that lit crit is not a science, and that even in a good situation it's hard to make value judgements, he said that it's nevertheless not all just a matter of taste. However, the introduction of literary theory into Britain in the seventies, undermining the whole notion of literary value and hierarchy, had, he felt, diminished the ability of English Departments to take part in debates about value. Newspaper criticism has decreased, and the power of judgement has largely devolved to literary prizes and online commentators.

Poet John McAuliffe then laid roundly but with characteristic good humour into the Booker.  He recalled the Booker in what he called its heyday, mentioning among others Midnight's Children,  The God of Small Things and Vernon God Little, books which he said administered shocks to British literary culture. In recent years, though, he felt, Booker winners have been echoes, imitations of those earlier books rather than making new noises of their own. This year authors whose books could have administered such shocks - Patrick McGuinness, Dermot Healy, Kevin Barry - had been left off *, the last two even from the longlist, and the problem with them having been left off is that they have already more or less disappeared. Altogether, in his view, while British poetry prizes are closer to the pulse of the form, the Booker is now a publishers' prize for the Christmas market.

A few interesting points that came up in the following Q & A: Someone suggested that the sales of shortlisted books are not always good, but M J Hyland said that sales of her shortlisted book far outstrip that of her others, and keep doing so. In response to the idea that the best books stand the test of time and rise to the top anyway, she said that getting a prize is a great thing for an author, though, because authors need to eat and can very rarely make a living out of writing.  On the idea that many winners don't stand the test of time, Vona Groarke made the point that we can hardly expect them to: in fact, we would be very lucky to get a truly remarkable book each decade, leave alone each year.  Someone, Ian McGuire I think, commented that to invest in just two or three writers a year (which results from the prize culture) does not make for a healthy literature culture. Writers need to be given a chance to develop their careers, to produce non-prizewinning books at the start, and I think the implication was that a literary conversation dominated by prizes pushes publishers away from that. On the other hand (my notes tell me someone said), prizes could contribute to such a different kind of culture, but I don't recall anyone saying how. De Groot suggested that literary festivals bespeak a public desire to have the kind of conversation about books that was generally felt to be squeezed. Finally Festival Director Cathy Bolton asked what the panel felt about the online platform to which Ian McGuire saw that the literary discussion had moved. M J Hyland said she found it scary - she could be devastated by a bad Amazon review - but such democratisation and widening of the discussion had to be a good thing. Ian McGuire said that some of it was excellent, more objective than newspaper criticism which often consisted of writers reviewing each others' books, and one had to view it as part of the changing world of books.

* In an earlier published version of this post an elision of mine had Patrick McGuinness left off the longlist. Thanks to Dan Holloway for pointing out the error, which was mine and not John McAuliffe's, and apologies to John and the judging panel.

Prizes, literature and language

Wonderful article in today's Guardian by the ever-inspirational Jeanette Winterson, on the recent Booker debate. Here are the bits I love: 'Novels that last are language-based novels - the language is not simply a means of telling a story, it is the whole creation of the story.' Like Maths, she says, literature is another kind of language, not 'obscure or rarified precious - that's no test of a book - rather it is operating on a different level to our everyday exchanges of information and conversation ...There is such a thing as art and there is such a thing as literature.' And she doesn't mince her words: 'I did try to read Stella Rimington's own spy series, but ... began to wonder if we would choose an enthusiastic member of a painting-by-numbers club to judge the Turner prize.'

But don't rely on my cherry-picking, go and read the whole article if you haven't already.

Last night - before coming back to Rimington's extraordinary Booker speech, in which she spent most of the time defending herself and her fellow judges from criticism, dissed those who had offered their own choices, and failed to follow what I remember as a tradition of using the moment to give some limelight to each of the shortlisted books - I attended a very interesting Manchester Lit Fest debate on Prize Culture by staff of the Manchester University Centre for New Writing. I took notes and I'll write them up here if I get time later today.

Guardian First Book Award longlist

The Guardian First Book Award longlist has been announced (list follows below).

From the press release: 

Commenting on the longlist Lisa Allardice, awards chair and editor of the Review, Guardian, said: "First novels are often accused of being overly autobiographical, but several of this year’s entries are audacious takes on topical subjects such as Amy Waldman’s The Submission, set in the aftermath of 9/11 in New York, or Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English, about gang warfare in a South London estate.”

“The non-fiction titles are equally strong and wide-ranging, including a memoir of a young writer’s love affair with Russian literature, to a magisterial ‘biography’ of cancer, to a polemical anatomy of British class hatred. And not forgetting Rachel Boast's truly luminous collection of poetry, Sidereal.”

“For the first time we opened up the judging process, inviting readers to nominate a title for the final place on the longlist: Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos takes us deep into the world of Mexican drug lord and is a lively addition to an extremely exciting longlist."

Click here for a picture gallery of the books on the list, with extracts and reviews.

The list:

Non-Fiction
The Possessed by Elif Batuman, Granta
Chavs by Owen Jones, Verso
Emperor of Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee, Fourth Estate

Fiction
Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman, Bloomsbury
The Submission by Amy Waldman, Heinemann
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, Harvill
The Book of Lies by Mary Horlock, Canongate
The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed, Penguin
Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos, And Other Stories

Poetry
Sidereal by Rachel Boast, Picador

Booker longlist

The appearance of so many books by small presses on this year's Booker longlist (below) warms the cockles. In a comment on the Bookseller site Jane Rogers, whose futuristic Testament of Jessie Lamb was published this spring by the tiny Highland Sandstone press, and which now appears on the list, says: 'Until yesterday's longlist announcement, I thought it was likely to sink without trace, since it had only 3 reviews, and was barely visible in bookshops. This longlisting means it will be read.'  Wonderful, when  lately there has been the whiff of sell-out around some prizes, that this year the Booker has operated to allow great writing to triumph over market forces.

There is on the other hand a distinct lack of what one might call 'challenging' writing on the list, ie writing that doesn't fall into recognisable categories - Anne Enright and Ali Smith are conspicuous by their absence - and it has been noted elsewhere that for the first time genre writing makes up a good deal of the list, which last in itself is refreshing, but also indicates perhaps a leaning towards recognisable forms. In fact, I'd say that Jane Rogers, for instance, is a highly innovative writer who pushes the boundaries with voice, but her work is always at the same time admirably accessible, and this time she has gone further and opted for the sci-fi genre. This Booker list, it seems, demonstrates a turning away from writing that wears its challenge on its sleeve, and one wonders how far that reflects moves in the industry in general.

Here's the list:

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape)
• On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry (Faber)
• Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch (Canongate Books)
• The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt (Granta)
• Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan (Serpent's Tail)
• A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvvette Edwards (Oneworld)
• The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst (Picador)
• Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman (Bloomsbury)
• The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness (Seren Books)
• Snowdrops by AD Miller (Atlantic)
• Far to Go by Alison Pick (Headline Review)
• The Testament of Jessie Lambby Jane Rogers (Sandstone Press)
• Derby Day by DJ Taylor (Chatto & Windus - Random House)

Thinking Not Allowed

Well, here is perhaps the most depressing sign yet of the dumbing down of our literary culture by those in charge of its wellbeing, and of their utter patronisation of readers. According to an article in Wednesday's Independent, Costa judge Jonathan Ruppin, who is the web editor at Foyles bookshop, stated that it was not a strong year for fiction this year, adding that the omission of Howard Jacobson and David Mitchell from the shortlist was due to the fact that 'their work was too cerebral to recommend to the masses'.

And there we have it, folks: out-and-out proof that in this brave new world of ours, intellect is seen as weakness and something to be kept well away from us, the 'masses'.

Thanks to Lynne Hatwell via Facebook

Self-promotion and Underpromotion

The Not the Booker Prize over on the Guardian books blog has raised the very interesting question of the role of social networking in making books known. (Must say, stuck in my literary purdah in the Welsh hills I hadn't even caught that the Prize was going on in the first place - the Guardian blog page takes five minutes to load up in the mountain, if it loads up at all, that is - leave alone had the ability to rally my mates and fans to nominate my book, if I could bring myself to do such a thing, so I guess that tells you something.)

And Lionel Shriver gets her teeth into the issue of male versus female novelists and gives it a good shake, arguing that female writers never receive the kind of accolades awarded to their male counterparts, and suffer from an infantilizing 'prettification' by marketing departments:

...trussing up my novels as sweet, girly and soft is like stuffing a rottweiler in a dress

Guardian First Book Award Ruling

The Bookseller picks up on the dismay of small literary publishers at the introduction of an entry fee for the Guardian First Book Award. Katie Allen reports:

A number of smaller presses The Bookseller spoke to said they would not be entering. Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley, who scored a shortlisting for Matthew Hollis' Ground Water in 2004, said he could not afford to: ”All the smaller publishers are really concerned." He added: "It really affects poetry . . . For fiction [an entry fee] may be part of the promotional budget but not poetry."

Salt publishing director Jen Hamilton Emery said: ”I can understand why they have done it, but it's a lot of money. It's putting off a lot of people [from entering]. . . We always put in three entries. . . we may only put in one.” She added: ”It will exclude a lot of authors not published by big publishing houses."

Indies triumphant then?

Further news/thoughts on small and independent publishers and literary prizes:

Writing in the Guardian about the shortlist for the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction, John Dugdale points out that it is dominated by books from independents, and that since its early years this prize has given due attention to independents. Noting also that the Costa, the Orwell and the Independent Foreign Fiction prizes were all won by independents this year, and that the Orange Prize was 'two-thirds indy', he concludes that favouring books from independents is a trend in this year's prizes.

Well, this does seem a reassuring picture of the chances for independents in our UK prizes. However, I suspect that several of these prizes create more of a level playing field than the Booker (or the Dylan Thomas prize) by not requiring a payment from publishers for publicity for chosen books. I couldn't ascertain this for sure with the Samuel Johnson prize (the rules don't appear to be published on the website), and I couldn't even find a website for the IFF, but there appear to be no such restrictions for the Orange Prize (though I'm not sure the rules are printed in full), and there are certainly none for the Orwell who do publish their rules in full.

Download the PDF entry rules for the Costa and you will see that, like the Booker and the Dylan Thomas, the Costa does require a commitment of money: last year £3,000 for the winner of a category, and a further £4,000 for an overall winner. But then I also suspect that Craig Raine was quite happy (and able) to fork out for a project which must be a personal labour of love - the winning book, Christopher Reid's A Scattering being the first and, I think, so far only book of Raine's newish publishing imprint Arete (which produces a literary journal). Not exactly a parallel situation to that of most small arts-council funded imprints...

Publicity Costs and Prizes

I was reminded yesterday by a visitor to this site of an article by Robert McCrum last October about trends which perhaps explain the move by UK prize administrators to charge winning publishers fees to cover publicity costs. The main thrust of McCrum's article is that globally fiction and fiction prizes are news which receive media coverage, but he presents this as a surprise (and something of a reassurance) in view of the UK situation. Once upon a time in the UK publicity for prizes was huge and free, he says, but now:

Yesterday, as I looked through the Sunday papers over breakfast, my thoughts began to turn to Tuesday's [Booker] prize-giving ceremony in London's Guildhall. Which TV channel would be covering it this year?

Flicking through the schedules, it's as if none of the terrestrial channels is prepared to touch it with a barge pole

and he finds the same situation with radio. Through this perspective, one can perhaps understand the move towards charging publishers, but this doesn't change the fact that the net effect is to discriminate against small publishers and to contribute to a squeezing of their (often groundbreaking) work from our culture.

Another Prize Problem for Small Publishers

Interestingly, since I posted yesterday about the Booker Prize rules which discriminate against smaller publishers, Neil Astley of poetry imprint Bloodaxe complained the same day on Facebook (to a chorus of dismay from other poetry publishers) that, for the first year ever, there is an entry fee for the Guardian First Book Award. The fee is £150, and if that seems derisory, then I would suggest a better acquaintance with the kind of shoestring budgets on which most poetry small publishers subsist, such as would make them think twice about submitting a new poet on the off-chance of their winning (longlisting, as someone on the Facebook thread points out, often not resulting in many sales).

The Guardian move seems even more graphically to discriminate against small presses. In the FB thread, Salt publisher Jen Hamilton-Emery points out that this has always been an expensive prize for small presses to enter, as publishers of shortlisted books are required to provide 100 copies free for the reading groups involved, thus effectively wiping out the profits on that book for a small publisher. There are similar discouraging restrictions for the Booker, which I didn't mention yesterday: for the Booker the publisher must be prepared to have 1,000 copies available 10 days after longlisting, for which, as I indicated yesterday, many small presses, used to doing smaller print runs and even POD, won't have the upfront ready cash, and which cash, again, may not be recovered in sales. And the publisher must also undertake to retain two 'folded and collated' copies for binding by a named leather binder, another thing which, it seems possible to me, could militate against publishers using alternative technologies, though I'm not an expert on this stuff, so I could be wrong. The rule doesn't state who bears the cost of the binding, so maybe at least that's part of prize...