Showing all posts about literature
Gabrielle Zevin wins Goodreads Choice best fiction award
9 December 2022
Los Angeles based American author Gabrielle Zevin has won the Best Fiction award in the 2022 Goodreads Choice Awards, with her latest novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which was published by Penguin Random House earlier this year:
On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.
One of the games created by the characters in the novel, EmilyBlaster, has since become an actual game. Zevin’s book is on my TBR list, hopefully I get to it over the summer break.
Other titles to collect awards this year include The Maid by Nita Prose, which won in the Mystery and Thriller category, while Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel, won the Science Fiction award.
Goodreads members cast near on six million votes, in seventeen categories, for their favourite titles in the annual poll of books published in the last year.
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books, Gabrielle Zevin, literary awards, literature, novels
Never revisit your past that includes NaNoWriMo manuscripts
7 December 2022
British journalist and writer Tim Jonze on participating in NaNoWriMo 2021, meeting the fifty-thousand word target in the requisite thirty days of November, and then… reading the work — for the first time — a year later:
Well, it’s been a year since NaNoWriMo. Could this book really be as bad as I imagined? Amazingly, the answer is no.
It is much, much worse.
Aside from the fact I could not meet the average 1,667 daily word requirement, to successfully complete NaNoWriMo, reading what I’d written, would be the other reason why I’d not take part.
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books, events, literature, writing
The Best Books of 2022 from The New Yorker
12 November 2022
Twenty-twenty-two must be winding down if “best books of the year” lists are beginning to appear.
The Best Books of 2022, from the New Yorker, is the first summary I’ve seen so far, though they add the crucial “for now” provision. After all, anything could happen in the next month and a half. It’s a pretty extensive list, and includes the fiction work of two Australian authors I could see, Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au, and The White Girl by Tony Birch.
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Australian literature, books, Jessica Au, literature, Tony Birch
Dates announced for the 2023 Melbourne Writers Festival
22 October 2022
The 2023 Melbourne Writers Festival (MWF) will take place from Thursday 4 May 2022 until Sunday 7 May. Mark it on your calender. The 2023 event will be held a few months earlier than the 2022 which ran during September.
Update: the decision by MWF organisers to move the event to early May 2023 has upset the convenors of a number of other literary events taking place at, or around, the same time. Most noteably organisers of the nearby Bendigo Writers Festival are particularly concerned, as their event takes place at exactly the same time.
It seems to me the MWF move could have been better thought out. To say the least.
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events, literature, Melbourne, writing
Shehan Karunatilaka wins 2022 Booker Prize with The Seven Moons of Maali Almeid
18 October 2022
After much speculation as who would win the 2022 Booker Prize, and whether there was even any point in speculating in the first place, Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka has been named winner of the 2022 Booker Prize, for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeid.
Of the winning title, the Booker judges said:
Any one of the six shortlisted books would have been a worthy winner. What the judges particularly admired and enjoyed in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was the ambition of its scope, and the hilarious audacity of its narrative techniques. This is a metaphysical thriller, an afterlife noir that dissolves the boundaries not just of different genres, but of life and death, body and spirit, east and west. It is an entirely serious philosophical romp that takes the reader to ‘the world’s dark heart’ — the murderous horrors of civil war Sri Lanka. And once there, the reader also discovers the tenderness and beauty, the love and loyalty, and the pursuit of an ideal that justify every human life.
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Booker Prize, literary awards, literature, Shehan Karunatilaka, writing
Watchmen co-creator Alan Moore takes up prose writing
11 October 2022
British comic book writer Alan Moore, whose credits include the Watchmen series of stories, and work in the Batman and Superman universes, is swapping graphic novels for prose writing.
Speaking with Guardian writer Sam Leith, Moore makes some blunt observations regarding superhero comics, and the part that a thirst for such comic books among adults, rather than children, has contributed to the current state of the world.
I didn’t really think that superheroes were adult fare. I think that this was a misunderstanding born of what happened in the 1980s — to which I must put my hand up to a considerable share of the blame, though it was not intentional — when things like Watchmen were first appearing. There were an awful lot of headlines saying ‘Comics Have Grown Up’. I tend to think that, no, comics hadn’t grown up. There were a few titles that were more adult than people were used to. But the majority of comics titles were pretty much the same as they’d ever been. It wasn’t comics growing up. I think it was more comics meeting the emotional age of the audience coming the other way.
It’s well worth reading the full article.
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Alan Moore, graphic novels, literature
Love Your Bookshop Day 2022
8 October 2022
Today is Love Your Bookshop day.
Love Your Bookshop Day 2022 is an annual celebration of everything local bookshops do from fostering expert staff and curating fabulous ranges to creating events programs to celebrate authors, readers, and the books they cherish.
Bricks and mortar bookshops may not be so abundant anymore, but they are an integral part of the writing and publishing industry. In addition to being a source of work for their staff, and a haven for book lovers, bookshops are also vital in helping new authors develop some profile.
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books, literature, novels, writing
Annie Ernaux named Nobel Prize Literature laureate 2022
7 October 2022
French writer Annie Ernaux has been named the Nobel Prize Literature laureate for 2022. In selecting Ernaux, judges cited “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.”
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Annie Ernaux, literary awards, literature
Only in 2114 can books in the Future library be read
30 September 2022
Since 2014, The Future Library, located in the Deichman Library in Oslo, Norway, has been going about assembling a collection of one hundred manuscripts, at the rate of one work per year. When the library reaches capacity, in 2114, the collection will be made available to one thousand people who have purchased certificates allowing them, or a descendent, access to the writings.
The ‘Silent Room’ where the manuscripts are to be kept is built using wood from the original trees felled to make way for the trees planted for the project. Katie Paterson has been working with the architectural team to design this part of the new public library. The collected works will be on display but the manuscripts will not be available for reading.
The library, which is the brainchild of Scottish visual artist Katie Paterson, has so far invited prominent authors, including Margaret Atwood, Han Kang, and Ocean Vuong, to submit manuscripts. I like the idea, but I’m not sure about having to wait almost one hundred years to read what’s in the collection, even if I knew I’d still be around by then.
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The 2022 National Young Writers Festival
23 September 2022
The 2022 National Young Writers’ Festival (NYWF) runs from Thursday 29 September, through to Sunday 2 October, both in Newcastle, Australia (about one hundred and sixty kilometres north of Sydney), and online.
NYWF is so-called Australia’s largest gathering of young writers, with artists bringing their craft from all around (cities, regional, rural and our beloved regular cohort from Aotearoa). We showcase work in both new and traditional forms including zines, comics, blogging, screenwriting, poetry, spoken word, hip hop, music, journalism, autobiography, comedy and prose.
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