Kate Clanchy's Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, published by Picador, has been shortlisted for the 2020 Orwell Prize for Political Writing. The judges said, "In this book, a brilliantly honest writer tackles a subject that ties so many people up in knots – education and how it is inexorably dominated by class. Yet this is the very opposite of a worthy lecture: Clanchy's reflections on teaching and the stories of her students are moving, funny, full of love and offer sparkling insights into modern British society."
Clanchy's book was chosen from a longlist of twelve, which includes Hussein Kesvani's Follow Me, Akhi and Azadeh Moaveni's Guest House for Young Widows. The winner of the £3,000 Orwell Prize for Political Writing will be unveiled on George Orwell’s birthday, 25th June.
Patrick McGuinness' Throw Me to the Wolves has been shortlisted for the 2020 Encore Awards. Based on the story of Christopher Jefferies, hounded by the press for a crime he didn’t commit, this novel is an elegiac exploration of trauma, the historical abuse and violence in schools, and the corrupt power of the popular media. Click hereto watch McGuinness reading from the book.
The Encore Award, which will be announced on June 25th, was first presented in 1990 to celebrate the achievement of outstanding second novels. This year's prize mark's the award's 30th year and is being judged by RSL fellows Edmund Gordon, Nikita Lalwani and Eley Williams.
Jon Ronson and Bellingcat have both been nominated for the British Podcast Awards in the Best True Crime Podcast category. Jon Ronson's podcast, The Last Days of August, focuses on the tragic death of August Ames and uncovers some uncomfortable truths about the adult entertainment industry she worked in. In The Bellingcat Podcast: MH17, Eliot Higgins and his team investigate the shootdown of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17.
The awards, now in its fourth year, celebrate the best of British podcasts over the last 12 months and attract the biggest names in podcasting. With over seven million people listening to podcasts each week in the UK, podcasts are stronger than ever and on 11th July, the British Podcast Awards powered by Acast will announce the winners.
Claire Adam has won the 2020 Authors' Club Best First Novel Award for her debut Golden Child(Faber & Faber), which is a deeply affecting novel set in Trinidad, following a family as they navigate impossible choices about scarcity, loyalty, and love. The prize is for the debut novel of a British, Irish or UK-based author, first published in the UK, and there is no age limit.
The winner was announced by novelist Andrew Miller via video at the close of the Authors’ Club virtual Litfest on May 17th. Claire Adam accepted her award saying: “Thank you so much and congratulations to all the authors who were on the shortlist and congratulations as well to all first time novelists. We've all done a great thing in getting our first novel published. We all know it's not easy sometimes to get through it but we made it.” Click here to watch her speech.
Nick Laird's Feel Free has been shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. The collection effortlessly spans the Atlantic, combining the acoustic expansiveness of Whitman or Ashbery with the lyricism of Laird's forebears Heaney, MacNeice and Yeats. With characteristic variety, invention and wit (here are elegies, monologues, formal poems and free verse) the poet explores the sundry patterns of freedom and constraint - the family, the impress of history, the body itself - and how we might transcend them.
The Derek Walcott Prize includes a $1,000 cash award, along with a reading at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, the publication of a limited-edition broadside by Arrowsmith Press, and a week-long residency at Derek Walcott’s home in either St. Lucia or in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. It is awarded to a full-length book of poems published in 2019 by a living poet who is not a US citizen.
Fuchsia Dunlop'sThe Food of Sichuan, published by Bloomsbury, is winner of this year's Fortnum & Mason Cookery Book Award. The book revisits the areas that informed Dunlop's gastronomic journey two decades ago, providing a guide to recreating Sichuanese classics such as Mapo tofu, Twice-cooked pork and Gong Bao chicken, a traditional spread of cold dishes comprising Bang bang chicken, Numbing-and-hot dried beef, Spiced cucumber salad and Green beans in ginger sauce.
The annual prize- which aims to celebrate the very best in writing, broadcasting, and publishing on food and drink- was awarded in the first ever digital-only ceremony on May 14th. Each of the winners accepted their award via video and have received a bespoke Fortnum’s award, a bottle of Fortnum’s champagne and a Fortnum & Mason hamper. Click here to watch the full ceremony.
Katherine Rundell is taking part in a new initiative by the British Library to form an online National Library of Miniature Books. Reading from her own homemade tiny book she showcases her story ‘The Young Bird Catcher’ in the video below. The story also appears in the anthologyThe Book of Hopes, edited by Katherine Rundell, and available to read for free from the National Literacy Trust here.
Inspired by the Brontë children who created postage stamp-size books for their toy soldiers two hundred years ago and the British Library’s own collection of miniature volumes, The British Library is calling on the nation’s children to help them by making their own tiny books and sharing them with its Twitter account @BL_Learning ...
The winner of the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award is ‘Pemi Aguda for The Suicide Mothers, a work of fiction. Ian Rankin OBE (Chair of the Judges) introduced the shortlisted authors and then announced the winner who will receive the prize of £10,000.
‘Pemi Aguda accepted her award via video:
In second place was Stephen Buoro for The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa and in third place S. Bhattacharya-Woodward for Zolo and Other Stories. Both titles are works of fiction. The authors will each receive £1,000.
Ian Rankin, Sarah Perry and Max Porter, the judges of the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award, made their shortlist selection from a longlist of eig...
Fuchsia Dunlop's The Food of Sichuan, published in the US by Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd, is among three finalists for the 2020 James Beard International Cookbook Award. The book revisits the areas that informed Dunlop's gastronomic journey two decades ago, providing a guide to recreating Sichuanese classics.
The Foundation will forego a physical ceremony for the 2020 Media Awards. Instead, they will issue a press release on Wednesday, May 27, 2020 announcing the winners. These awards honor the year’s outstanding restaurants and chefs, as well as food journalism, books, and broadcast media.
Niamh Campbell's 'Love Many' and Joseph O'Neill's 'The Flier' have been longlisted for the 2020 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award. The prize is awarded annually to celebrate the excellence of the modern short story.
The Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award is the richest prize for a single short story in the English language, worth £30,000 to the winner and £1,000 to the other five shortlisted writers. The award, for a story of 6,000 words or less, is open to any novelist or short story writer from around the world who has been published in the UK or Ireland.
The 2020 Branford Bose Award shortlist has been revealed, featuring Holly Jackson's A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, in which a schoolgirl investigates the murder of another under the guise of writing an EPQ on the media’s coverage of the crime; and Aisha Bushby's A Pocketful of Stars, in which a young girl finds herself with a magical puzzle to solve after she is transported back to her sick mother’s childhood home in Kuwait.
Set up in memory of award-winning author Henrietta Branford and her editor Wendy Boase, one of the founders of Walker Books, the Branford Boase Award is given annually to the author of an outstanding début novel for children. Uniquely the Branford Boase Award also honours the editors of the winning title, which includes Lindsey Heaven at Electric Monkey for A Good Girl's Guide to Murder and Liz Bankes and Sarah Levison at Egmont for A Pocketful of Stars.
Natalie Haynes' A Thousand Ships, published by Mantle Books, is among the six-strong 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist. Haynes' retelling of the Iliad sets out to demonstrate that the Trojan war “is a woman’s war, just as much as it is the men’s,” and to draw attention to “the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men.”
The prize is next planning to host a deep dive into the six shortlisted books and a behind-the-scenes look at the judging process via video conferencing platform Zoom on 6th May with Women’s Prize founder director Kate Mosse. Owing to the coronavirus pandemic, this year’s shortlist readings have been postponed and will now be held at the Southbank Centre on 8th September 2020. Tickets can be purchased from the Southbank Centre website from 27th April.
Books in e-book format are now being made available to all NHS workers for free across Hachette UK’s divisions, including Orion, Little, Brown, Headline, Quercus, Hodder & Stoughton, John Murray Press, Hachette Children’s Group and Octopus Publishing Group. Taking part are Ian Rankin's In a House of Lies, Alex Michaelides' The Silent Patient, Alice Oseman's Heartstopper and Sophie Hannah's Haven't They Grown. This scheme will initially be available until the end of May.
If you’re an NHS worker, please click here to download your free e-book. Thank you to everyone at the NHS for your dedication during the pandemic.
Fuchsia Dunlop's The Food of Sichuan, published by Bloomsbury, is among the three books shortlisted for the Fortnum & Mason Food & Drink Awards in the Cookery Book category. The book revisits the areas that informed Dunlop's gastronomic journey two decades ago, providing a guide to recreating Sichuanese classics such as Mapo tofu, Twice-cooked pork and Gong Bao chicken, a traditional spread of cold dishes comprising Bang bang chicken, Numbing-and-hot dried beef, Spiced cucumber salad and Green beans in ginger sauce.
The annual prize- which aims to celebrate the very best in writing, broadcasting, and publishing on food and drink- will be awarded in the first ever digital-only ceremony on May 14th. Each of the winners will recieve a bespoke Fortnum’s award, a bottle of Fortnum’s champagne and a Fortnum & Mason hamper.
Azadeh Moaveni, Kate Clanchy, Hussein Kesvani and James Meek are among the longlisted authors for this year's Orwell Prize for Political Writing and Political Fiction. While Meek's To Calais, in Ordinary Time is longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, Clanchy's Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, Moaveni's Guest House for Young Widows and Kesvani's Follow Me, Akhi are all up for the Political Writing Prize.
This is the second year that the prizes for fiction and non-fiction have been separated, previously umbrelled under The Orwell Book Prize. The shortlists for both prizes will be announced in mid-May. The prizes are worth £3,000 each and the winners will be announced on George Orwell's birthday, the 25th June.
Isabella Hammad's The Parisian, which is published by Jonathan Cape, is among the ten debuts longlisted for the 2020 Desmond Elliott Prize. The historical fiction book is about a young Palestinian dreamer, Midhat Kamal. It encompasses his childhood in Nablus, Palestine, student days in Montpellier, the turbulent years of the first world war and the Palestinian struggle for independence.
The Desmond Elliott Prize is now the flagship award in the National Centre for Writing’s portfolio of Early Career Awards, launched in 2019 to support new writers. This year it is judged by Preti Taneja, Sonia Sodha and Sinéad Gleeson. A shortlist will be announced on 6th May and the winner will be revealed on 2nd July.
Clare Rees' Jelly, published by Chicken House Books, has won the Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award for best debut novel. Inspired by a fourteen-century Viking romance, Jelly is about a group of people trapped just off the coast and their attempts to reach land. As environmental disaster has caused the sea levels to rise along with ancient monsters, it also appropriately features a giant jellyfish (kraken) as the main villain.
The Golden Tentacle is awarded annually to a debut novel that best fits the criteria of progressive, intelligent and entertaining. It is sponsored by Blackwell's and the winner receives a £500 prize as well as a hand-crafted trophy.
Alex Michaelides' The Silent Patient, a million copy bestselling thriller with an unguessable twist, is among the twelve books up for the 2020 Glass Bell Award. This longlist adds to Michaelides' recent accolades, which includes the British Book Awards: Crime & Thriller Book of the Year shortlist.
Launched in 2017, the Glass Bell Award celebrates the best storytelling in every genre. It is judged by a group of ten people from Goldsboro Books, DHH Literary Agency and The Dome Press. The shortlist of six will be announced on 11th May, with the winner, who will receive both £2,000, and a handmade, engraved glass bell, will be announced on 2nd July.
Inua Ellams is among the six authors shortlised for the 2020 Brunel International African Poetry Prize with his forthcoming poetry collection, The Actual, due to be published by Penned in the Margins this October. The Nigerian-born writer said in The Bookseller: "The collection came out accidentally, the poems poured out quickly and fiercely, between writing screen and stage plays, all written on my phone, in transit, between meetings, before I'd fall asleep and as soon as I'd wake up. The topics and range of the poems are vast and reflect much of our fast-paced and increasingly polarised world. I am as excited to share them as I am nervous of their reception."
The award is aimed at the development, celebration and promotion of poetry from Africa, and it is currently the largest cash prize for African poetry. It was founded by Booker Prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo in 2012 at a time when African poetry was almost invisible on the international literary landscape.
Jean-Baptiste Del Amo'sAnimalia (Fitzcarraldo Editions), translated from French by Frank Wynne, is the winner of the 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize. The book follows a peasant family in the 20th century as their plot of land is developed into an intensive pig farm, and it is about war, violence, sickness and cruelty.
Due to the outbreak of Covid-19, the Republic of Consciousness has decided to share its prize pot of £10,000 equally between all five shortlisted publishers “in what is an extremely difficult time for small businesses and freelancers,” with the87press, And Other Stories, Galley Beggar Press and Dostoevsky Wannabe all to receive £2,000 alongside Fitzcarraldo.
