The shortlists for the Costa Awards were announced on Front Row last night. A list of the books competing for the £30,000 prize is below. The judging panels will meet between now and mid December, and the individual category winners will be announced on Wednesday 4th January 2012. The final awards ceremony will then take
Andrew Feinstein is a former South African MP and member of the African National Congress (ANC). He served as the chairman of the parliamentary public accounts committee and resigned in 2001 when the ANC refused to conduct an investigation into the notorious 1999 South African Arms Deal. He has recently published an exhaustive study of
The weekend’s literary pages sounded the Last Post in honour of Remembrance Sunday. The re-release of Sir Andrew Motion’s collection of war poems, Laurels and Donkeys, is being feted by critics. And Motion read from the book at a party in Oxford on Friday night, a memorable experience for those who witnessed it. The former Poet Laureate
The Divinity School at the Bodleian library was the setting for the Clutag Press‘s 10th birthday party celebrations this evening. Several of Clutag’s authors from down the years convened to read excerpts of their work to a large public audience. Andrew Motion was the star attraction, although you wouldn’t have known that from his unassuming
Edward IV was a conflicted man. He was a prodigious boozer and wencher, and a voracious reader and thinker. The bon vivant founded the English Royal Library: an assortment of illuminated books from England and continental Europe, some of which were bound before the Norman Conquest. It was a treasury of 100s of years of
A change from the usual format this week, as it is Armistice Day. This clip is taken from a documentary made in conjunction with Simon Armitage’s 2008 war collection, The Not Dead. The veteran is quoting from Armitage’s poem, ‘The Malaya Emergency’. It speaks for itself. Later today, Radio Four’s afternoon play will be devoted
P.D. James has already said a great deal about her love of Austen, her love of the mystery genre and her new book Death Comes to Pemberley. She was in London earlier this evening, talking again about how her enthusiasms became manifest in a book. She is a self-effacing and hugely erudite speaker; a natural
Literary festivals are a very big deal in India, if Vikram Seth is to be believed. Seth made an impromptu appearance at the Mumbai literary festival last week. “The whole thing was pretty chancy. I was supposed to be in England for the launch of The Rivered Earth yesterday. I was in Mumbai for the
Yesterday, American bookstore Barnes & Noble launched its latest crusade against the Kindle. At a special conference at its New York headquarters, it unveiled the ‘Nook’ tablet to a raucous fanfare. The Bookseller reports that “everything about the press conference was an aggressive counter-punch to its main rival and its tactics”. The Kindle was compared to a
Richard Bradford styled his biography of Martin Amis as ‘The biography’, an odious gesture that would tempt fate on even the busiest day. Are there any scoops? With the exception of a few mild indiscretions from Christopher Hitchens — no, there are not. Early in the piece, Bradford thanks Amis for his ‘co-operation’, which amounted to five
The regally refurbished St. Ermin’s Hotel in Westminster hosted a party this evening in honour of Robert Hardman and his new book, Our Queen. Hardman, a veteran royal correspondent, broke from the exhausting canapés (which were inspired by George VI and the Queen Mother’s hearty wedding breakfast – lobsters, black pudding, chicken and an array of fish), to
Tomorrow is E-Day: the publication of Umberto Eco’s latest novel, The Prague Cemetery. The book concerns the fictitious Protocols of the Elders of Zion and how they were still accepted even after being exposed as a fabrication in 1921. This is natural territory for Eco the semiotician. He told the Times (£): ‘I always had an interest
Don’t believe the pseuds. You don’t have to be clever to read Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot. The novel is his first since the Pulitzer Prize winning Middlesex in 2002 and on one level it is terribly, terribly clever. The central character goes to university, where she studies the intricate marriage plots common to many
Here is the late and incomparable Kurt Vonnegut giving a short lecture on stories and relativity. This video was apparently used in American high schools in the ‘80s and with good reason: displaying narrative as a graph is a brilliant way of examining structure and character development. You could go beyond Vonnegut’s rough demonstration and
The Gallery at Foyles hosted the launch of the latest issue of Granta earlier this evening. The magazine teems with illustrations by the Chapman brothers, which gives away the theme: horror. Contributors Will Self and Mark Doty were the guests of honour and they discussed their essays. Self spoke of the nature of blood in
The launch of Anthony Horowitz’s new Sherlock Holmes book, The House of Silk, went swimmingly. You might say it was elementary, if you couldn’t resist the temptation to talk Holmesian. Many could not. An astonishing number of people turned out for the exclusive book signing this evening at Waterstone’s Piccadilly, which had been turned into 221B Baker Street.
There was an unintentional theme to the weekend’s literary pages: murder, in some shape or form. There are fictions, histories and real life whodunits to choose from, if crime is your guilty pleasure. First up: Death in Perguia, a comprehensive account of the Kercher case written by the Sunday Times’ John Follain, who covered the investigation and
<a href= “http://vimeo.com/30774612” _fcksavedurl= “http://vimeo.com/30774612″>NBCC Reads at Center for Fiction: On the Comic Novel</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/user2300381″>NBCC</a> on <a href=”http://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>. America’s National Book Critics Circle discussed the comic novel last week. Here is a video of their discussion, which ranged from Tom Jones to A Visit from the Goon Squad. Interesting to note Beth Gutcheon’s
Picasso once told Roland Penrose, his friend and biographer, that he left Barcelona in 1900 to go to England, the home of his idols Edward Burne-Jones and Aubrey Beardsley. It took Picasso 19 years to get here, when the Ballet Russes took him to London to design its production of Le Tricorne. In honour of
Last Saturday, Phillip Pullman addressed library campaigners at a convention in London and declared war on the “stupidity” of nationwide library closures. Pullman’s presence brought the Church of England to mind, merely as a counter-point to his often very public atheism. How has the established church responded to the end of community libraries and the