Every year throws up some dead certs and some surprizes, veteran and debut authors, and now the prize is open to all books written in English worldwide, I feel the Man Booker Prize longlist is increasingly difficult to pin down. I went to the Man Booker website to see who is judging this year: Baroness Read More
Category: Book Awards & Prizes
Wellcome Book Prize Tour – Mend the Living
Today, I’m delighted to be the first stop on the blog tour for the Wellcome Book Prize 2017. This year’s winner will be announced in London on Monday 24th April – sadly I won’t be able to go to the ceremony – I’ll be doing my first aid training at school, instead of getting Read More
Bookish Delights
Yesterday I was delighted to be invited to attend a bloggers afternoon at the Groucho Club hosted by literary agents PFD to meet and hear some of the authors shortlisted for this year’s Sunday Times/Peters Fraser Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award – and you couldn’t hope for a more diverse collection of literary styles Read More
Celebrating medicine, the human condition, illness and health…
The Wellcome Book Prize Yesterday I was privileged to attend a lovely ‘Bloggers Brunch’ at the Wellcome Collection in London to celebrate the shortlist for the Wellcome Book Prize. Let me tell you a little about the background to this before I describe the event. The Wellcome Trust, which was founded in 1936 is “an independent Read More
Fiction Uncovered
Two trips into London in one week (see here for the other), is going out a lot for me! I wouldn’t have missed last nights Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize at the Jerwood Space in Southwark for the world. Many thanks to the enterprising Simon Savidge, (I’m calling him that as he loves projects) who was not Read More
Loneliness and a life wasted?
The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer It’s quite a feat to win a major prize with your first novel, but that’s what The Twin did, taking the prestigious IMPAC Award in Dublin back in 2010. Henk and Helmer are twins – identical in features, but with very different characters. When they Read More
Bored on Boxing Day? Check out 'The Folio 80' …
If you’re like me, you’ll be sneaking off to have a look and see if anything is happening around the blogosphere today in the quieter moments! So I’ve prepared a big linky post for you … I looked at the 2015 Folio Prize reading list of 80 nominated titles which was published in mid-December with initial dismay Read More
So bleak – thoughts about the Carnegie winner
The Bunker Diary by Kevin Brooks (republished into its original place in the time-line from my lost post archive) I’d been too busy lately to get involved with reading any of the Carnegie shortlisted books this year until the results were announced. The Carnegie Medal for 2014 was recently awarded to Kevin Brooks’ latest novel The Read More
Riding the slipstream …
The Adjacent by Christopher Priest Today I shall direct you to another review I wrote for Shiny New Books:- The Adjacent by Christopher Priest, now out in paperback. Priest is one of those authors who defies genre, yet routinely gets categorised as a science fiction author. True his books often have some SF elements in, and The Read More
Rewarding YA reading for Grown-ups! Let me persuade you…
I’m in my early fifties prime (!) and I’m not afraid to say that I love reading modern YA books now and then … but only good ones, naturally. By using the term ‘YA’ here, I’m distinguishing them from those books we usually call ‘children’s classics’ (which still appeal to readers young and old alike). I’m Read More
Carnegie Longlist 2013
The longlist for the 2013 Carnegie Medal has been announced and I was please to see quite a few books I’ve already read on it, plus several in my TBR pile – and of course in an ideal world I’d like to read all of them! The Carnegie Medal is awarded annually to an outstanding Read More
An exceptional story for all ages…
A Monster Callsby Patrick Ness The British writer Siobhan Dowd won the Carnegie Medal posthumously in 2009 for her last book, Bog Child. She’d started working on another, but died of breast cancer before she had started writing. Her outline was handed to Patrick Ness, author of the acclaimed Chaos Walking trilogy and he wrote the Read More
Stalin & UFOs – a philosophical SF thriller
Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts. This novel was short-listed for the Arthur C Clarke Award for Science Fiction novels last year, but it’s really more of a philosophical thriller and a commentary on the fall of Communism than out and out science fiction. It’s dark, thoughtful, thrilling and hilarious by turns and I loved Read More
