Date: September 16, 2007 | Discussion: 5 Comments
Due to the lack of time that I have to properly run this website, I have decided to stop actively working on it. The Burnt Ones, therefore, effectively closes its doors.
I am currently at a point in life where I don’t have the amount of time and energy for my hobby projects as I used to. Consequently, I am forced to more carefully choose what I want to do, and while The Burnt Ones has always been both a lot of fun and very interesting to work on, I am sorry to announce that it is now one of the things that I have decided to drop from my daily schedule. Simply put, the service eats up more of my time than I am really able to give it at the moment.
While I could probably run the website half-heartedly (as I have admittedly been forced to do in the past few months), I don’t frankly see any point in doing so. A poorly run news service, even when done with the best intentions, is still a poorly run web service, and it wouldn’t in the end serve anyone’s interests.
The website and the archives will remain as they are now. As for the future, I may at some point re-launch The Burnt Ones if I find myself once again with more time at my disposal. But that at the moment looks like a big ‘maybe’.
Thanks for the ride, everyone. I hope it was at least somewhat useful to some of you!
Date: August 29, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
The American Pulitzer Prize winning author Cormac McCarthy has been awarded the 2007 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction for his novel The Road.
The annual £10,000 James Tait Black Prize is the oldest literary prize in the UK, and among the most prestigious awards given for literature written in the English Language.
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
A father and his son walk alone through burned America, heading through the ravaged landscape to the coast. This is the profoundly moving story of their journey. “The Road” boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which two people, ‘each the other’s world entire’, are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.
You can read more about The Road at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Date: August 8, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Longlist for the 2007 Man Booker Prize has been revealed. From the 13 authors on the list, only one (Ian McEwan) has been nominated for the award before. Furthermore, four first-time novelists have also made the list.
This year’s longlist is:
Nicola Barker: Darkmans
Edward Docx: Self Help
Tan Twan Eng: The Gift Of Rain
Anne Enright: The Gathering
Mohsin Hamid: The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Peter Ho Davies: The Welsh Girl
Lloyd Jones: Mister Pip
Nikita Lalwani: Gifted
Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach
Catherine O’Flynn: What Was Lost
Michael Redhill: Consolation
Indra Sinha: Animal’s People
A.N. Wilson: Winnie & Wolf
Shortlist will be announced on the 6th of September, and the winner will be known on the 16th of October.
Date: August 8, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
The American Academy of Poets has selected Charles Simic as the recipient of the 2007 Wallace Stevens Award. The $100,000 poetry prize has been awarded since 1994, and recognizes “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry” in the English language.
The Yugoslavian-born Simic’s poetry first appeared in publication after his family’s move to the United States in the late 1950s. He has since published more than twenty collections of poetry, as well as some forty other books.
Simic’s work can be found at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, and Amazon.co.uk.
Date: August 2, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Winners of the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards have been announced. The awards, given annually to the best writing in New Zealand, were this year dominated by Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip, which won the Medal (main prize), and was selected as the fiction winner by both the panel as well as the readers. Janet Frame, meanwhile, won the Poetry Prize for her posthumous collection The Goose Bath.
Works awarded this year in the fiction categories are:
MEDAL FOR FICTION OR POETRY, FICTION WINNER, READERS’ CHOICE AWARD: Mister Pip
by Lloyd Jones
In a novel that is at once intense, beautiful, and fablelike, Lloyd Jones weaves a transcendent story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the power of narrative to transform our lives. On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens’s classic Great Expectations. So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape. As Mr. Watts says, “A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe.” Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.
You can read more about Mister Pip at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
FICTION RUNNER UP: The Cowboy Dog
by Nigel Cox
When Chester Farlowe’s father is killed, Chester is forced to leave the vast cattle ranches of New Zealand’s central volcanic plateau for the badlands of urban Auckland. Henry Stroud, proprietor of the I Fry takeaway wagon, takes him under his wing and rechristens him “Mr. Dog.” Still full of anger six years later, Chester sets out to plot revenge on his father’s killer and finds that he must contend with Boss Lennox, the Sultation Kid, and the seductive and inscrutable Miss Peet before he gets to the showdown. This mythical story reconfigures the New Zealand experience with an absorbing coming-of-age tale.
You can read more about The Cowboy Dog at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
FICTION RUNNER UP: The Fainter
by Damien Wilkins
Unfortunately, no description is available for this work.
POETRY: The Goose Bath
by Janet Frame
Unfortunately, no description is available for this work.
BEST FIRST FICTION: The Sound of Butterflies
by Rachael King
Unfortunately, no description is available for this work.
BEST FIRST POETRY: Secret Heart
by Airini Beautrais
Unfortunately, no description is available for this work.