July 28, 2002

The Aventis science book prize was picked up by Cambridge’s Professor Stephen Hawking for The universe in a nutshell. The book is yet another attempt by Hawking to unravel the cosmos for the lay person. The Aventis prize is awarded to a popular science or technology book, and the winner receives £10,000. On receiving the prize Hawking remarked that it was unexpected, since “my previous book didn’t win any prizes, despite selling millions”.

Hawking is the current Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a post once held by Sir Isaac Newton. The writer who suffers from a debilitating disease, which renders him wheelchair-bound, wrote his first book, A brief history of time, back in 1988. The book became a bestseller but most found it incomprehensible. The new winning work is an attempt to make the subject yet more accessible.

Literary auction

A Sotheby’s auction sold first edition books by Beatrix Potter and J.R.R. Tolkien for tens of thousands dollars. One of the first 250 copies of Potter’s Peter Rabbit sold for a cool $64,780 and a copy of the very first edition of Tolkien’s classic The Hobbit (1937) fetched $66,630. The auctioned copy was signed by the author and presented to his aunt within two weeks of publication. It was the highest price ever paid at an auction for a Tolkien classic.

A signed copy of Harry Potter and the philosopher’s stone went for $16,660. A 250-piece collection of rare works by Charles Dickens sold for $512,650.

President, hero?

Vladimir Putin is the hero of an action thriller written by Latvian author, Aleksandr Olbik. The casting is not completely implausible since the Russian President was indeed a one-time spy for the KGB. In the thriller the president appears as a post-Soviet spy who hunts down and assassinates Chechen rebel leaders. A huge controversy surrounding the novel titled President has erupted in Moscow over the latest offering. Defending his choice of protagonist, Olbik said, “What I wrote is a literary version of the events that could have occurred... The former Soviet Union has not had a political leader like Putin for a long time. Russia needs a strong leader because we have strong enemies.”

In the book he defends and explains away many of Putin’s moves and refutes the allegation that he wrote the book on the request of the president. Putin has a near-cult following in Russia and signs of his popularity are everywhere. Two students were recently forced to close “Bar Putin” and the president has also been praised in a pop song.

A win...finally

The millionaire writer Terry Pratchett has won his first major literary award. Pratchett whose Discworld novels have sold even more than the Harry Potter novels in the 1990s was awarded the Carnegie Medal after being declared ‘brilliant’ and ‘outstanding’. So far the author had been treated with disdain by the British literary establishment but readers love him. The worldwide sales of his book have been 27 million copies which was more than any British billionaire writer, till JK Rowling took the lead.

When he heard that The amazing Maurice and his educated rodents had won, Pratchett said, “I’m delighted and genuinely shocked”. In his acceptance speech he declared that his work dealt with profound themes but “...put in one lousy dragon and they call you a fantasy writer”.

The Carnegie worth only £5,000 is nevertheless prestigious and previous winners have included C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman.

Upgraded comics

Publishers are lending respectability to a genre long considered inconsequential. Comic books are upgrading and increasing their scope from incredible tales of heroics and detection to a relatively literary version. And publishers are taking it seriously, as are the readers.

Comics will now tell more complex stories ‘This is an art form that is every bit as valid for telling stories and entertaining people as movies or any other form,’ says Max Allan Collins, the author of a popular 300-page ‘smart’ comic, Road to Perdition. Sitting on the shelf, the comic novel looks like any other book, but inside illustrated panels and text balloons may take the casual reader by surprise.

Publishers have coined the term ‘illustrative literature’ to describe the genre and say the demand is driven by readers who grew up reading comics, but are now looking for more sophisticated and cerebral stimulation.

The Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman, who wrote and illustrated Maus (1987) about the holocaust, is credited with upgrading the graphic novel. While DC Comics and other comic book publishers have immediately picked up the trend, the more traditional publishing houses such as Doubleday have started their own graphic novel divisions. Bookshops are stocking them and reviewers are treating them more seriously. Not one to be left behind, Hollywood has also adapted movies from them.

Filming Frazier

Charles Frazier, who is the author of Cold mountain, is working on his next novel about Will Thoman, the only white man who ever became a Cherokee chief. The novel will be published in 2005 but the rights to film the novel have already been snapped up by producer Scott Rudin.

Bapsi awarded

The North American Zoroastrian Congress presented Bapsi Sidhwa the Excellence in Performing Arts and Literature Award 2002. About 700 Zoroastrians attended the event.

This isn’t the first time that Sidhwa has been acknowledged for her outstanding work. Besides this, she has a host of other honours to her credit. She received the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Writers Award in 1994, the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Pakistan’s highest national honour in the arts and the Li Beraturepreis in Germany.

Sidhwa shot into fame with her first novel The crow eater (1980). Next came The bride, The ice candy man (1985) and The American brat (1993), the last of which was filmed under the title “Earth 1947” by Deepa Mehta.

Hollywood strikes again

Hollywood has taken over another novel. Richard Morgan’s Altered carbon has been bought by Joel Silver the man who produced blockbusters such as “The matrix” and “Die hard”. Morgan who is an English language teacher will pocket $1million through the deal

Morgan, who teaches English to foreign language students at Strathclyde University, is writing a sequel to Altered carbon, which was previously rejected by several London publishers.

Altered carbon is a surreal novel set in the future when it would be possible to download the human soul into another body through a process called “sleeving”.

Catch up on your reading

Harried and hurried commuters pressed for time can go to the Web site the-phone-book.com to catch up on their reading. The site has some of he world’s shortest stories. Stories so short, they can be read at a glance in the screen of a web-enabled mobile phone.

Hemingway days

The 50th anniversary of the publication of The old man and the sea was celebrated at Key West during the annual Hemingway Days festival in July. The festival also ran through the author’s 103rd birth anniversary and celebrated Hemingway’s life and work. Festivities included a look-alike contest for stocky men with white beards, a party at the author’s Key West home, the unveiling of Hemingway memorabilia and a short story competition.

The author lived in Key in the 1930s, and regularly went marlin fishing which led him to write the classic The old man and the Sea. The tale of a Cuban fisherman earned Hemingway a Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and contributed to the writer receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year.

Stalking Rowling

Seems like when it comes to stalking, no one is safe. A woman accused of stalking J.K. Rowling, creator of the popular Harry Potter has been deported from the UK.

Melissa Kumsuk Cho, 41, an American has been accused of harassing the author by calling her repeatedly over the phone. She was also found guilty of sending disturbing letters to the writer’s home and of using illegal means to gain personal information about the writer. Charged with harassment, Cho who was living illegally in Scotland was deported back to the US.

Re-sparking controversy?

A revised edition of Humayun Mirza’s book From Plassey to Pakistan (first published in 1999) is expecting a release tentatively around September this year. Mirza who is the son of former Pakistani president Iskandar Mirza wrote the book many years ago, sparking a controversy and a public rift with other family members.

The book traces the history of the subcontinent with a special emphasis on the author’s ancestors. He traces the history of India from colonization to the first fifty years of Pakistan including the period during which his father was President. In the revised version, Mirza has included the post-September 11 role of Pakistan with a special emphasis on Kashmir and the turnaround in its foreign policy.

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