British Book awards balance art and selling power to decide best writer in 30 years

Novelists rub shoulders with presidents, chefs, comedians and thriller megastars on longlist to define the title with the biggest impact on the book worldIt could be almost the setup for a joke, but a former president, a Booker winner and an erotic fiction superstar have walked on to the British Book awards’ longlist, and one of them could be crowned the best writer of the past three decades.Barack Obama, Hilary Mantel and EL James are three of the bestselling writers on an eclectic list drawn up to celebrate the awards’ 30th anniversary.A Year in Provence, Peter Mayle (Penguin) | 1990Delia Smith’s Christmas (BBC Books) | 1991Wild Swans, Jung Chang (William Collins) | 1992The Art Book (Phaidon) | 1995Longitude, Dava Sobel (Fourth Estate) | 1997Northern Lights, Philip Pullman (Scholastic) | 1997Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling (Bloomsbury) | 1998Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding (Picador) | 1998Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières (Vintage) | 1998The Illustrated Mum, Jacqueline Wilson and Nick Sharratt (Doubleday) | 2000White Teeth, Zadie Smith (Penguin) | 2001Sahara, Michael Palin (Weidenfeld Nicholson) | 2003Brick Lane, Monica Ali (Transworld) | 2004The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Mark Haddon (David Fickling) | 2004The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold (Picador) | 2004The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (Transworld) | 2005The Gruffalo’s Child, Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler (Macmillan) | 2005The Sound of Laughter, Peter Kay... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2020-02-14 06:01:23 UTC ]

Other news stories related to: "British Book awards balance art and selling power to decide best writer in 30 years"


Who Needs Intimacy?

Influential novelists are imagining what women’s lives might look like without the demands of partners and children. Continue reading at The Atlantic

[ The Atlantic | 2025-04-04 12:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Translator and Author Tim Mohr Dies

Mohr, who translated such German novelists as Alina Bronsky, chronicled the Berlin music scene in a 2018 book, and helped bring to life a number of musicians’ memoirs, died at his home in Brooklyn on March 31. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly

[ Publishers Weekly | 2025-04-01 04:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Translator and Author Tim Mohr Dies at 55

Mohr, who translated such German novelists as Alina Bronsky, chronicled the Berlin music scene in a 2018 book, and helped bring to life a number of musicians’ memoirs, died at his home in Brooklyn on March 31. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly

[ Publishers Weekly | 2025-04-01 04:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


UK publishing less accessible to Black authors now than before 2020, industry names say

Ahead of the Black British book festival, literary figures say the number of books being published by Black writers has ‘plummeted’UK publishing is less accessible to Black authors now than it was five years ago, according to some of the biggest names in the industry.The Black Lives Matter... Continue reading at The Guardian

[ The Guardian | 2025-03-26 17:06:01 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Interview: Tori Amos on Her Children’s Book and Her Reading Life

His memoir “Growing Up” depicted her hometown “like a shining city on a hill.” Other authors who mean a lot to the musician (and now childrens’ book writer): Kevyn Aucoin and Hilary Mantel. Continue reading at The New York Times

[ The New York Times | 2025-03-13 09:00:09 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Who Were the Women Novelists Who Really Inspired Jane Austen?

“You see, but you do not observe.” –Sherlock Holmes, “A Scandal in Bohemia” * It all started with a book that made me curious. I was on a house call in Georgetown, invited to browse the personal book collection of a woman who used to be a professional rare book dealer like me. I spent […] Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2025-02-19 10:58:39 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Lit Hub Daily: February 18, 2025

Sophie Lewis chronicles the rise and fall of #girlboss feminism: “The funeral for ‘trickle-down feminism,’ eerily, keeps repeating itself, suggesting that, every time we report that the girlboss is dead, we’re being wishful.” | Lit Hub Criticism Rebecca Romney on unearthing a legacy of... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2025-02-18 11:30:57 UTC ]
More news stories like this


What should the cover of Pride and Prejudice look like?

This week, the book-reading internet was apparently in a mild uproar over six redesigns of Jane Austen novels, which will be published—with new introductions from popular contemporary YA romance novelists like Ali Hazelwood and Tessa Bailey—by Puffin, Penguin UK’s children’s imprint, in March.... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2025-02-04 14:47:27 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Betty Shamieh on the Next Generation of Palestinian Fiction

I purposely avoided reading the works of other Palestinian American novelists making their ways into the world as I wrote Too Soon. When I looked up, I saw my book would be a part of a literary wave I had no idea I was riding, an artistic movement, that felt particular to the Palestinian... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2025-01-22 09:59:55 UTC ]
More news stories like this


British novelists criticise government over AI ‘theft’

Richard Osman and Kate Mosse say plan to mine artistic works for data would destroy creative fieldsKate Mosse and Richard Osman have hit back at Labour’s plan to give artificial intelligence companies broad freedoms to mine artistic works for data, saying it could destroy growth in creative... Continue reading at The Guardian

[ The Guardian | 2025-01-14 17:52:02 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2024

Among the former president's year-end shout-outs are novels that made the rounds on longlists for major awards, such as those by Martin MacInnes and Ayşegül Savaş and the Booker-winning Samantha Harvey, along with deep cuts from Dinaw Mengestu and Adam Moss. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly

[ Publishers Weekly | 2025-01-09 05:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Impoverished authors are told they should do it for the love. Try saying that to a dentist | Gareth Rubin

The average income for a writer is now £7,000. For our sake and the country’s, we need financial assistanceThis week will be like A-level results week for authors, but with added economic jeopardy. For a good whack of the 100,000 writers and translators in the UK, finding out how many books they... Continue reading at The Guardian

[ The Guardian | 2025-01-05 08:00:15 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Three Literary Translators Discuss Their Paths to Writing Their Debut Novels

Writing fiction itself might be (and often is) considered an act of translation: from experience to language, from emotion to logic, from chaos to legibility. Perhaps it is a mere coincidence, or a stroke of good luck, then that these three fall debut novelists selected for our craft series each... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2024-12-17 12:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Method Writing: What Novelists Can Learn From Actors About Self-Expression

I wrote What It’s Like in Words in my dressing room in the St Martin’s theatre in the West End whilst playing Miss Casewell in The Mousetrap, and over nine months and approximately 300 shows it occurred to me how similar the processes of writing and acting are. They may appear binary forms of... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2024-12-04 09:55:59 UTC ]
More news stories like this


How Should Debut Novelists Measure Success?

Earlier this May, an Esquire article by Kate Dwyer called “Why Are Debut Novels Failing to Launch?” channeled the fear of debut novelists everywhere: What happens if no one buys my book? Book sales are an important way for editors and agents to gauge whether to invest in an author. If her first... Continue reading at The Millions

[ The Millions | 2024-10-16 12:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this