The “British literature” category includes literary awards news and reports related to fiction, poetry and drama produced in the area of Great Britain. This includes many worldwide awards that also consider British literary works.
To see all the latest literary awards news, see the front page of The Burnt Ones: Literary Awards News.
Orange Broadband Prize shortlist announced
Date: April 18, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
The 2007 shortlist for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction has been announced. The highly prestigious UK award is given annually to the best original full-length novel written by a female author in English, and published in the UK in the preceding year. The winner of the prize receives £30,000.
This year’s shortlisted authors are:
Half of a Yellow Sun
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The sweeping novel from the author of ‘Purple Hibiscus’, shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and winner of the Commonwealth Writers Award. This highly anticipated novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood. The three main characters in the novel are swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer’s house. The other is a young middle-class woman, Olanna, who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. And the third is a white man, a writer who lives in Nigeria for no clear reason, and who falls in love with Olanna’s twin sister, a remote and enigmatic character. As these people’s lives intersect, they have to question their own responses to the unfolding political events. This extraordinary novel is about Africa in a wider sense: about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race; and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these things. …
You can read more about Half of a Yellow Sun at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Arlington Park
by Rachel Cusk
Amid the leafy avenues and comfortable houses, the residents of Arlington park live out the dubious accomplishments of civilisation: material prosperity, personal freedom, and moral indifference. Men work, women look after children, and people generally do what’s expected of them. Set over the course of a single rainy day, this novel moves from one household to another, and through the passing hours conducts a deep examination of its characters’ lives: of Juliet, enranged at the victory of men over women in family life; of Amanda, warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework; of Solly, who confronts her own buried femininity in the person of her Italian lodger; of Maisie, despairing at the inevitability with which beauty is destroyed; and of Christine, whose troubled, hilarious spirit presides over Arlington Park and the way of life it represents. …
You can read more about Arlington Park at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
The Inheritance of Loss
by Kiran Desai
At the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, lives an embittered old judge who wants nothing more than to retire in peace. But with the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and his cook’s son trying to stay a step ahead of US immigration services, this is far from easy. When a Nepalese insurgency threatens Sai’s blossoming romance with her handsome tutor they are forced to consider their colliding interests. The judge must revisit his past, his own journey and his role in this grasping world of conflicting desires every moment holding out the possibility for hope or betrayal. …
You can read more about The Inheritance of Loss at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
by Xiaolu Guo
Z is a 23-year-old Chinese language student who has come to London to learn English. When the book begins she can barely ask for a cup of tea, but when language comes, so does love. As she gets to know British culture she also falls for an older English man who lives a resolutely bachelor life in Hackney. It’s a million miles away from the small Chinese town she comes from, where her parents want nothing more for her than that she should follow them into the shoe business. Z learns about sex, humour, companionship and passion, but she also learns the painful truth that language is also a barrier and the more you know about it, the less you understand. Written in short chapters, each the definition of a word, this is a brilliantly clever book that pokes fun at England and China and explores the endless possibilities for misunderstanding between East and West, men and women. …
You can read more about A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
The Observations
by Jane Harris
Scotland, 1863. In an attempt to escape her not-so-innocent past in Glasgow, Bessy Buckley—a wide-eyed and feisty young Irish girl—takes a job as a maid in a big house outside Edinburgh working for the beautiful Arabella—the “missus.†Bessy lacks the necessary scullery skills for her new position, but as she finds out, it is her ability to read and write that makes her such a desirable property. Bessy is intrigued by her new employer but puzzled by her increasingly strange requests and her insistence that Bessy keep a journal of her mundane chores and most intimate thoughts. And it seems that the missus has a few secrets of her own, including her near- obsessive affection for Nora, a former maid who died in mysterious circumstances. …
You can read more about The Observations at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Digging to America
by Anne Tyler
Friday August 15th, 1997. Two tiny Korean babies are delivered to Baltimore to two families with nothing in common. First there are the Donaldsons, decent Brad and homespun Bitsy and a host of relatives, taking delivery with characteristic American razzmatazz. Then there are the Yazdans, pretty, nervous Ziba and carefully assimilated Sami, with his elegant Iranian-born widowed mother Maryam, receiving their little bundle with wondering discretion. Every year, on the anniversary of ‘Arrival Day’ the two families celebrate together, with increasingly elaborately competitive parties, as tiny, delicate Susan and wholesome, stocky Jin-ho, take roots and become American. …
You can read more about Digging to America at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Filed under British literature, English literature, Fiction, Novels, Winners
National Short Story Prize shortlist announced
Date: April 18, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
The 2007 National Short Story Prize shortlist has been announced. The Brittish prize, which is the largest in the world for a single short story, gives £15,000 for the winning story, £3,000 for the runner-up, and £500 for the other three stories on the shortlist. The award is open to UK nationals or residents who are 18 or older. The story must not be more than 8000 words. The prize is funded by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.
This year’s shortlist, from which the winner will be announced on Monday 23 April, is:
‘Slog’s Dad’ by David Almond
‘The Morena’ by Jonathan Falla
‘The Orphan and the Mob’ by Julian Gough
‘How to Get Away with Suicide’ by Jackie Kay
‘Weddings and Beheadings’ by Hanif Kureishi
Filed under British literature, English literature, Fiction, Short stories, Shortlists
Man Booker International shortlist announced
Date: April 12, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Shortlist for the 2007 Man Booker International Prize, a biennial prize awarding living authors published in English, has been announced. The listed authors are:
Chinua Achebe
Margaret Atwood
John Banville
Peter Carey
Don DeLillo
Carlos Fuentes
Doris Lessing
Ian McEwan
Harry Mulisch
Alice Munro
Michael Ondaatje
Amos Oz
Philip Roth
Salman Rushdie
Michael Tournier
Winner of the £60,000 prize will be announced in June. The first Man Booker International Prize, which was awarded two years ago, went to the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare.
Filed under American literature, Australian literature, British literature, Commonwealth literature, English literature, Lifetime awards, Shortlists, World literature
Griffin Poetry Prize announces Canadian and International shortlists
Date: April 9, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
The Griffin Trust has announced the 2007 shortlists for both their Canadian and International poetry prices. The $100,000 (Canadian) poetry prize is among the most lucrative poetry prizes in the world and is awarded annually for the best books of poetry published in English in the previous year.
CANADIAN SHORTLIST
Airstream Land Yacht
by Ken Babstock
Unfortunately, no description is available for this work.
You can read more about Airstream Land Yacht at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Strike/Slip
by Don McKay
In this extraordinary collection from one of our most celebrated poets, Don McKay walks the strike-slip fault between poetry and landscape, sticks its strange nose into the cold silence of geologic time, meditates on marble, quartz and gneiss, and attends to the songs of ravens and thrushes and to the clamour of the industrialized bush. Behind these poems lies the urge to engage the tectonics of planetary dwelling with the rickety contraption of language, and to register the stress, sheer and strain — but also the astonishment — engendered by that necessary failure. …
You can read more about Strike/Slip at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Ontological Necessities
by Priscila Uppal
Written with the verve of the uninhibited artist but with a clarity of thought and expression more akin to the scientist or scholar, these poems investigate the emotional and philosophical struggles of contemporary life. Often sparked by the horrors depicted in today’s news, the poems combine surrealist images with spare and lyrical language to grapple with an increasingly absurd world. The most ambitious piece in the collection is a radical, post-9/11 translation of the Anglo-Saxon elegy The Wanderer, and other poems include “Don Quixote, You Sure Can Take One Helluva Beating,” “Film Version of My Hatred,” “Never Held a Gun,” and “The Romantic Impulse Hits the Schoolyard.” …
You can read more about Ontological Necessities at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
INTERNATIONAL SHORTLIST
Tramp in Flames
by Paul Farley
‘A book of astonishing variety and range and no little emotional bravery, “Tramp in Flames” shows Farley rapidly becoming one of the most unfailingly interesting writers of any genre, and definitive English voices of the age.’ …
You can read more about Tramp in Flames at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Salvation Blues
by Rodney Jones
‘This expansive and accessible collection presents one hundred choice poems, including twenty-four bold new pieces, from one of America’s “best, most generous, and most brilliantly readable poets” (Poetry). In the tradition of William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, Rodney Jones conjures an America that betrays stereotyping. Playing the tension between history and modernity, his poems arise where, as James Dickey put it, “the agrarian and industrial civilizations stand face to face, equally bewildered.”‘ …
You can read more about Salvation Blues at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Ooga-Booga: Poems
by Frederick Seidel
‘From the winner of the PEN/Voelker Award, poems of love, terror, rage, and desire. The poems in Ooga-Booga are about a youthful slave owner and his aging slave, and both are the same man.’ …
You can read more about Ooga-Booga: Poems at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Scar Tissue
by Charles Wright
‘In his new collection, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Wright investigates the tenuous relationship between description and actuality–”thing is not an image”–but also reaffirms the project of attempting to describe, to capture the natural world and the beings in it, although he reminds us that landscape is not his subject matter but his technique: that language was always his subject–language and “the ghost of god.” And in the dolomites, the clouds, stars, wind, and water that populate these poems, “something un-ordinary persists.”‘
You can read more about Scar Tissue at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Filed under American literature, British literature, Canadian literature, English literature, Poetry, Shortlists
International IMPAC Literary Award shortlist announced
Date: April 9, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Shortlist for the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, which at 100,000€ is the world’s most lucrative prize for a single work of fiction published in or translated into English, has been announced. The list of eight novels, selected from 169 novels nominated by libraries from around the world, is:
Arthur and George
by Julian Barnes
Praised as a “master storyteller†(The Wall Street Journal) and hailed for his “flawless use of language†(Boston Herald), Irish author and playwright Sebastian Barry has created a powerful new novel about divided loyalties and the realities of war. In 1914, Willie Dunne, barely eighteen years old, leaves behind Dublin, his family, and the girl he plans to marry in order to enlist in the Allied forces and face the Germans on the Western Front. …
You can read more about Arthur and George at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
A Long Long Way
by Sebastian Barry
Praised as a “master storyteller” (The Wall Street Journal) and hailed for his “flawless use of language” (Boston Herald), Irish author and playwright Sebastian Barry has created a powerful new novel about divided loyalties and the realities of war. In 1914, Willie Dunne, barely eighteen years old, leaves behind Dublin, his family, and the girl he plans to marry in order to enlist in the Allied forces and face the Germans on the Western Front. …
You can read more about A Long Long Way at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Slow Man
by J.M. Coetzee
Paul Rayment is on the threshold of a comfortable old age when a calamitous cycling accident results in the amputation of a leg. Humiliated, his body truncated, his life circumscribed, he turns away from his friends. He hires a nurse named Marijana, with whom he has a European childhood in common: hers in Croatia, his in France. Tactfully and efficiently she ministers to his needs. But his feelings for her, and for her handsome teenage son, are complicated by the sudden arrival on his doorstep of the celebrated Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello, who threatens to take over the direction of his life and the affairs of his heart. Unflinching in its vision of suffering and generous in its portrayal of the spirit of care, “Slow Man” is a masterful work of fiction by one of the world’s greatest writers. …
You can read more about Slow Man at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is an inventor, amateur entomologist, Francophile, letter writer, pacifist, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, Great Explorer, jeweller, detective, vegan, and collector of butterflies. When his father is killed in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre, Oskar sets out to solve the mystery of a key he discovers in his father’s closet. It is a search which leads him into the lives of strangers, through the five boroughs of New York, into history, to the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima, and on an inward journey which brings him ever closer to some kind of peace. …
You can read more about Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
The Short Day Dying
by Peter Hobbs
This is the story of four seasons in the life of Charles Wenmoth, a twenty-seven-year-old apprentice blacksmith and Methodist lay preacher in Cornwall in 1870. Life is at its hardest; poverty is everywhere. Charles crosses and recrosses the raw, beautiful landscape, attending to the sick and helping the poor, preaching in chapels with ever-dwindling congregations. He questions his faith along the way but never quite loses it, balancing it with the pleasure he takes in nature, the light in the skies, the colors of the earth, and in his attachment to a girl to whom he is drawn by the piety and patience she maintains despite her long illness. …
You can read more about The Short Day Dying at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
No Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot dead, a load of heroin, and more than $2 million in cash. Taking the money out, he knows, will change everything. But only after two more men are murdered does a victim’s burning car lead Sheriff Bell to the carnage out in the desert, and he soon realizes that Moss and his young wife are in desperate need of protection. …
You can read more about No Country for Old Men at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Out Stealing Horses
by Per Petterson
Set in the easternmost region of Norway, Out Stealing Horses begins with an ending. Sixty-seven-year-old Trond has settled into a rustic cabin in an isolated area to live the rest of his life with a quiet deliberation. A meeting with his only neighbor, however, forces him to reflect on that fateful summer. …
You can read more about Out Stealing Horses at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Shalimar the Clown
by Salman Rushdie
This is the story of Maximilian Ophuls, America’s counterterrorism chief, one of the makers of the modern world; his Kashmiri Muslim driver and subsequent killer, a mysterious figure who calls himself Shalimar the clown; Max’s illegitimate daughter India; and a woman who links them, whose revelation finally explains them all. It is an epic narrative that moves from California to Kashmir, France, and England, and back to California again. Along the way there are tales of princesses lured from their homes by demons, legends of kings forced to defend their kingdoms against evil. And there is always love, gained and lost, uncommonly beautiful and mortally dangerous. …
You can read more about Shalimar the Clown at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Filed under American literature, British literature, Commonwealth literature, English literature, Fiction, Novels, Shortlists
Prometheus nominees announced
Date: March 29, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Nominees for the 2007 Prometheus Award, which annually honours libertarian science fiction, have been announced.
The nominees for this year’s main award are:
Empire by Orson Scott Card
The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi
Glasshouse by Charles Stross
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
Harbingers by F. Paul Wilson
The Prometheus Classic Hall of Fame recognizes classic pro-freedom freedom writing, with this year’s nominees being:
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
“As Easy as A.B.C.” by Rudyard Kipling
It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
“True Names,” by Vernor Vinge
Winners will be revealed at the end of August this year.
