June 30, 2002

The £30,000 Orange prize for fiction went to Ann Patchett’s novel Bel Canto. The author had been ranked lowest on the shortlist for the award, which is open to all women who write in English. Patchett sent shocks to the bookmakers who had rated her 7-1 as she walked away in a surprise victory. The winning novel is about a hostage situation in which two couples fall in love. Patchett beat novels such as Sarah Waters’s London crime novel Fingersmith and Helen Dunmore’s The siege, about the battle for Leningrad.

She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, and her novel The magician’s assistant was also once shortlisted for an Orange prize.

Not tempted...yet

Anything for money? Not always. Oscar-nominated scriptwriter and author William Nicholson has turned down a million dollars for the film rights of his children’s trilogy the Wind singer because, he says, he wants the bestsellers to remain in people’s imaginations.

The author said, “The minute a film is made, a book dwindles away and becomes nothing. I want it to be a book that people can make the movie in their heads.”

Nicholson says his personal ban on filming the books would hold for five years. The book is Nicholson’s first published work and is about a world where people’s lives are dominated by their exam grades.

Debut novel wins

The Betty Trask award went to Hari Kunzru for his debut novel The impressionist. The 32-year-old receives £8,000. The tale of a mixed race man’s journey from India to rightwing Oxford in the 1930s, and then to Africa received rave reviews when it was published earlier this year.

The Betty Trask is open to first-time novelists under the age of 35, who are Commonwealth citizens. Zadie Smith won the award last year for White teeth.

The winner is currently at work on his second novel, Transmission, which is due for publication next year. Six other authors were presented with Betty Trask Awards. These include Rachel Seiffert who received £5,000 for The dark room, and Shamin Sarif, who received £4000 for The world unseen. Four other writers won prizes of £2,000. Helen Cross for My summer of love, Australian Chloe Hooper for A child’s book of true crime, Susanna Jones for The earthquake bird, and Gwendoline Riley for Cold water.

Stunning retraction

Donald Foster, a professor of English at Vassar College, has stunned the world by admitting that he was wrong. Back in 1995 the professor proved that Shakespeare was the author of an obscure 578-line poem called A funeral elegy. A story appeared in the New York Times explaining his methods of computer analysis and the poem was added to three editions of Shakespeare’s work.

Now, Professor Foster has admitted he was wrong. He quietly admitted his mistake in an Internet discussion group saying that another poet and dramatist was the more likely author of the poem. Other scholars of Shakespeare joined him in the retraction. John Ford (1586-1640) best known for his dramatic works is now thought to be the likely author of the work. A debate over the authorship of the elegy had been carrying on for six years, in Internet groups, academic journals and books.

Fanny Burney who?

Largely forgotten novelist Fanny Burney was accorded the rare honour of a memorial window in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey on her 250th death anniversary.

Burney was one of the most successful writers of her day, and wrote the bestseller Evelina (1778). She was a friend of Samuel Johnson, and influenced many later more famous writers such as Jane Austen.

The success of her novel Evelina is being compared to that of present-day Bridget Jones’s Diary — both books without a precedent.

Those who remember her are usually aware of her published letters and diaries, which include a detailed description of undergoing a mastectomy without anaesthetic, and moments of history such as an assassination attempt on George III. She will be the only eighteenth century woman writer represented in Poets’ Corner.

Honouring Roots

One of the world’s most famous slave Kunta Kinte, immortalized in Alex Haley’s Pulitzer Prize novel Roots, was honoured in a euphoric ceremony in Annapolis. A memorial dedicated to the two was unveiled on the occasion.

The memorial is placed on the same dock on which Kunta Kinte arrived after being captured in Gambia and brought to America as a slave.

His descendant, the late Alex Haley who wrote about his ordeal, is honoured alongside him in the $750,000 memorial. The ceremony was the result of a 10-year effort to establish the memorial. It is the only memorial in the US to be dedicated to a named African slave.

Haley’s son, Annapolis resident William Haley, announce the formation of an Alex Haley museum on the occasion.

Who suffers?

A columnist who writes for a conservative Italian newspaper has come out with a book that claims that Christians are the victims of worldwide persecution. Antonio Socci, has stirred controversy by what many believe is an attempt at minimizing the Holocaust and demonizing Islam.

He claims that the real untold story is the murder of 45 million Christians, by communist and Islamic regimes, in the last century. A massacre he claims continues unabated.

The book titled The new persecuted inquiries into anti-Christian intolerance in the new century of martyrs, has angered some scholars, however some reviewers have praised the work. They have called it a wake-up call to Christians in the West who have not realized, that they are under attack by a rival religion.

In the book Socci traces the persecution of Christians through the centuries, and claims that in 2,000 years some 70 million Christians have been killed, and two-thirds of them in the past 100 years alone. The accused are mainly the Soviet Union as well as communist China and Nazi Germany. Critics are saying the figures include Christians killed in conflicts which had little to do with religion.

Six writers shortlisted for £30,000 award

Six shortlisted writers are waiting to win the top prize of £30,000 of the Samuel Johnson award for non-fiction. Sponsored by BBC Four, the prize, which is in its fourth year, celebrates all non-fiction, from biography to sport.

An interesting line-up of works is in the running. The shortlist includes Roy Jenkins’ biography of Churchill, Margaret Macmillan’s The peacemakers, a re-examination of the Versailles peace conference of 1919, and Brendan Simm’s Unfinest hour, about Britain’s involvement in Bosnia’s war.

The youngest author on the list is William Fiennes, who followed wild birds from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian Arctic for his debut work The snow geese. Richard Hamblyn’s The invention of clouds and Eamon Duffy’s The voices of Morebath also feature on the shortlist.

Children’s book controversy

In a move designed to stir yet more controversy Simon and Schuster have released a novel titled Strange boy about a 10-year-old homosexual. The book is aimed at teenagers and is a semi-autobiographical novel by author Paul Magrs. It is a story of a boy who has a crush on his 14-year-old friend. But the book deals with other pertinent issues as well such as family problems and bullying rather than exclusively with sexuality.

Speaking about the controversy waiting to happen Stephen Cole, the editor of the work, says that the most controversial thing about the book “...is that it does not make a big deal out of having a gay child as its protagonist. It’s just a given, like the colour of his hair or his love of Marvel comics. This is not an ‘issue’ book”.

Magrs, 32, defended the work as portrayal of a young person’s development. “I stick by the truth of it. It’s true for me, and it will be true for other people. People from all sorts of backgrounds and persuasions will find something in this book that they will recognize.”

Read on, dream on

You are likely to have bizarre dreams if your taste in reading matter veers more towards J.K. Rowling than thick volumes of factual history books. Psychologists have confirmed that readers of fiction are more likely to have bizarre dreams in a study carried out by the University of Wales. The university distributed 100,000 questionnaires and from the 10,000 replies established the result. The study also found that you are more likely to have nightmares if you enjoy thrillers but that if you are really into science fiction or fantasy you might even wake up in a cold sweat!

Other interesting revelations include that 58 per cent of all adults experienced at least one dream in which they were aware they were dreaming and that women remembered more dreams than men. Older people appear to dream less and have fewer nightmares while about 44 per cent of children surveyed said the books they had been reading affected their dreams.

C.S. Lewis attacked

Children’s writer, Philip Pullman, has attacked the author of the beloved Narnia books, C.S. Lewis, for being ‘blatantly racist’ and ‘monumentally disparaging of women’. Pullman won the Whitbread prize for his Dark materials trilogy which is a diametrically opposite tale to C.S. Lewis’ Christian tales. Right-wingers have called Pullman ‘the most dangerous author in Britain’ and ‘semi-satanic.’

In an interview, Pullman said when he read the Narinia tales he realized that Lewis was up to a propaganda in the cause of his religion. Supporting his accusations of it being disparaging of women Pullman says that one of the girls in his books was sent to hell because she was getting interested in clothes and boys. The Narnia books are considered to be amongst the favourites in children’s literature for the past 50 years.

Poet on letters

Last year the Academy of American Poets asked the public to vote for the poet they would most like to see on a stamp. Langston Hughes won the vote and Sylvia Plath and E.E. Cumming were runners-up. The Hughes stamp went into circulation earlier this year.

Eat your words

The Centre for Book Arts held its annual ‘Eat your words’ festival, which celebrates book-related artwork. Artists were given a free hand in deciding what to create but whatever it was had to be made entirely of edible material!

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