Showing all posts tagged: writing
Debut Writers Over 50, a literary award for mature authors
26 April 2023
Jenny Brown Associates, a literary agency based in Edinburgh, Scotland, announced the launch of a literary prize for emerging authors aged fifty and over, the Debut Writers Over 50 award, at this year’s London Book Fair. Speaking at the event, which was held last week, agency associate Lisa Highton said when it comes to starting out as a writer, youth should not be a prerequisite:
“The bestseller lists are full of debut novelists who are older, but the perception is that you have to be young when your first book comes out,” says literary agent Lisa Highton of Jenny Brown Associates. “But being a debut is not just about being a shiny, sparkly, young person. The reason we launched the award was to say to people over 50 yes, you too can be a shiny, sparkly, new writer – just older.”
This is a great initiative. I’m not sure how many literary awards cater for mature authors, but there sure seems to be plenty aimed at youth writers, and people aged under thirty-five. And that’s fine. Emerging younger writers need to be encouraged, since it’s difficult to become established in an industry dominated — usually — by, you know, older, big name authors, or those with several books to their name.
While the Debut Writers Over 50 award is for unpublished novelists residing in the United Kingdom, it’s good to see people commencing writing careers later in life being recognised. Submissions for the inaugural award close at the end of next month. A shortlist will be published on 27 July 2023, and the winner will be named on 26 August 2023, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
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literary awards, literature, writing
Jinghua Qian: my role as a sensitivity reader
22 March 2023
Jinghua Qian, writing for ArtsHub, about working as a sensitivity reader:
I might notice that the portrayal of a cultural activity is off: Australians talk about going ‘to the footy’ but not ‘to the ball game’.
The article I link to was published about three and a half years ago. Sensitivity readers aren’t exactly new, it’s just we’ve been hearing a lot about their work recently.
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literature, publishing, writing
Fear of litigation stops publication of some Australian books
18 March 2023
Fear of litigation is prompting some Australian publishers to reject manuscripts for titles they think may be contentious, particularly books about controversial public figures.
Melbourne based writer and editor Hilary McPhee, says poorer quality books are the result, if public interest stories end up being suppressed:
“We have fewer and fewer publishers and we have poorer and poorer books as a result. There’s a lot of cautiousness and nervousness. And the larger the company, the more nervous they are.” Larger companies were publishing fewer but more lucrative authors. A few smaller companies such as Upswell were taking risks, “but the big ones don’t seem to me to be brave. It’s terribly bad for authors.”
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2023 International Booker Prize longlist
15 March 2023
The 2023 International Booker Prize longlist was unveiled yesterday, and features eleven novels published internationally, which have been translated into English.
The 2023 judges are looking for the best work of international fiction translated into English, selected from entries published in the UK or Ireland between May 1, 2022 and April 30, 2023. The books, authors and translators the prize celebrates offer readers a window onto the world and the opportunity to experience the lives of people from different cultures.
French author Maryse Condé, at age 89, becomes the oldest person to be named on the Booker International longlist, with her novel The Gospel According to the New World.
Works by a film director, four poets, two former security guards, and a writer who had declared himself “dead” (curious), are also included. The shortlist will be announced on Tuesday 18 April 2023.
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Booker Prize, literary awards, literature, writing
More books by women than men were published in 2020
8 March 2023
Over fifty percent of books published in 2020 in the United States, were written by women, says Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of Minnesota:
By analyzing data from Goodreads, Bookstat, Amazon, and the National Library of Congress, Waldfogel found that women’s share of published titles increased from around 20% in the 1970s to over 50% by 2020. This likely displaced some male authors, but the change wasn’t just that male authors were replaced by female authors. Rather, the whole industry grew, and by 2021, female-authored books sold more copies on average than those written by men.
While I couldn’t immediately locate data regarding books published by gender in Australia, the trend here is mirrored, to a degree, in terms of reviews of books published by women, and non-binary writers. According to the Stella Count, fifty-five percent of books reviewed in Australian newspapers and magazines, in 2020, were written by women.
I’m not sure if that means more Australian books were written by women than men in 2020, but these numbers suggest that might be the case.
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Being productive or not on writer’s residency by Alice Robb
5 March 2023
A secluded, comfortable, cabin deep in the woods, without internet or phone access, seems like the ideal location to spend a writer’s residency. But writing without day to day distractions may not be as conducive to productivity as it sounds, says American author Alice Robb, writing for Literary Hub:
I pulled up the document with my half-finished book and read a few sentences. But I couldn’t focus: I wondered if anyone had texted me overnight. I considered hiking down to the WiFi zone, then scolded myself. I had come all this way to write without distraction. I returned to the document, trying to reorient myself, but before I could, the kettle hissed. Five minutes later, I was back at the desk, mug of coffee in hand. I reread the same sentences. Were they any good? I looked out the window. I looked back at the screen. I wondered if anyone had texted me.
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Alice Robb, literature, writing
If you wrote a book with ChatGPT, you did not write a book
24 February 2023
If ChatGPT wrote a book for you, can you really claim to have written said book yourself, asks American author Emily Temple, writing at Literary Hub:
Would-be author Brett Schickler told Reuters that after he learned about ChatGPT — which can instantly generate cogent blocks of text from any prompt — he “figured an opportunity had landed in his lap.” “The idea of writing a book finally seemed possible,” he explained. “I thought ‘I can do this.”’ In “a matter of hours,” he had prompted the AI software — using inputs like “write a story about a dad teaching his son about financial literacy” — to create a 30-page children’s e-book about a squirrel who learns to save his money. Well, hate to break it to you, buddy, but… you still haven’t written a book.
Writers are using the AI chatbot to assist with research (be sure to verify what ChatGPT tells you though) and maybe some passages of text. But if you’re going to spend your days constantly prompting ChatGPT for exactly what you want, why not do it yourself?
And while AI technologies might “write” a book for you in a matter of days, can it publish the work just as quickly? Not at the moment it can’t. You’ll still be waiting months, or more, to see your work on the shelves in bookshops.
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books, literature, technology, writing
ChatGPT must connect with people to succeed as an artist
24 February 2023
To make good art argues Billy Oppenheimer, writing for Every, the art creator must have a connection of some sort to people.
As an example, he cites the writers of the old Seinfeld TV sitcom, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, who, in the early days of the show, would go out and discreetly mix where people gathered, to figure out what they liked.
Their process played a part in the creation of the show’s many memorable screenplays. This is an advantage ChatGPT lacks. For the AI chatbot to succeed as an “artist”, it needs a more direct attachment to its audience.
Artists who get so famous that they can’t go out in public talk about how not being able to do so makes it hard to create art that connects. To come up with material for Seinfeld, for instance, Seinfeld and co-creator Larry David liked to hang out in public settings where they could observe and eavesdrop on strangers. As the show became a cultural phenomenon, Seinfeld and David couldn’t go out in public like they used to. Strangers didn’t act like strangers around them. This slow detachment from humanity made it harder to make a show that connected with humanity. When you don’t experience reality like most people do, it’s hard to make things that connect with most people.
Of course there’s no telling what people will go for, so a ChatGPT created work of art may still end up being riotously popular.
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art, creativity, technology, writing
Ukrainian writers withdraw from Adelaide Writers Week 2023
22 February 2023
Three Ukrainian authors, Kateryna Babkina, Olesya Khromeychuk, and Maria Tumarkin, who were scheduled to speak at Adelaide Writers Week in March 2023, are no longer participating in the event:
The event’s director, Louise Adler, confirmed Kateryna Babkina and Olesya Khromeychuk, who were scheduled to speak at a session on the impact of Russia’s invasion on Ukrainian civilians, had decided not to appear. She said the move was prompted by comments of another guest, Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa, who has described Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “Nazi-promoting Zionist” and accused him of dragging “the whole world into the inferno of WWIII”.
On Tuesday, Australian law firm MinterEllison withdrew their support for the festival, in the wake of the same comments made by Susan Abulhawa, a Palestinian-American author.
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Australia, events, literature, writing
If we start editing the work of Roald Dahl when do we stop?
20 February 2023
Puffin, an imprint of book publisher Penguin, has altered a selection of words in some of the children’s books written by late British author Roald Dahl:
In 1964 novel “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” which has been adapted twice as films in 1971 and 2005, starring Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp respectively, for example, the phrase “enormously fat” has been edited to just “enormous.” The same phrase in 1970 book “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” adapted as an animated film by Wes Anderson with a voice cast of George Clooney and Meryl Streep in 2009, has also been edited to “enormous.”
The removal of the word “fat” is one of a number of such changes.
A sentence accompanying the copyright notice in the most recent prints of Dahl’s books, alerted readers to the amendments, according to Ed Cumming, Genevieve Holl-Allen, and Benedict Smith, writing for British newspaper The Telegraph:
The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvellous characters. This book was written many years ago, and so we regularly review the language to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.
This is a thorny issue. Times have changed, and language, and use of words, once considered commonplace, have the previously unrealised, or unacknowledged potential, to offend some people. But — and say what you will about Dahl — changing words written by someone who is no longer alive, when they clearly have no say in the matter, is also problematic. The question posed by the practice is obvious. Once we start amending someone else’s previously published work — especially that of a deceased person — where do we stop?
It’s best we don’t start, and instead educate people, says Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America:
Better than playing around with these texts is to offer introductory context that prepares people for what they are about to read, and helps them understand the setting in which it was written.
It’s well worth taking the time to read through the entire of Nossel’s Twitter thread on the subject.
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