The award-winning Irish author on losing his father at 18, the drawbacks of English editors and the theme of imprisonment in his workMike McCormack was born in London in 1965 and raised on a farm in County Mayo in the west of Ireland. He published his first story collection, Getting It in the Head, in 1996, followed by three novels that have marked him out as an experimentalist. Notes from a Coma (2005) interspersed its narrative with a fragmentary commentary at the bottom of each page. His work reached a wider audience with 2016’s Solar Bones, in which a lonely Mayo engineer recalls his life in one unending sentence – it won the Goldsmiths prize and was longlisted for the Booker. His latest novel, This Plague of Souls, follows a painter named Nealon as he returns home from prison and sets out to find his wife and child amid brewing global unrest. McCormack lives in Galway with his wife, artist Maeve Curtis, and their son.What sparked the new book?I started writing it in 2012, around the same time as Solar Bones, which then asserted priority. It seems that I was very interested in how worlds collapse, but coming into Covid, the focus changed from how the world collapses to how do we put it back together. Both books are about men trying to build a world – one as an engineer, the other as an artist – and both books seem to think that world building has to do with the making of family. Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2023-11-11 18:00:01 UTC ]
Writer and critic Blake Morrison is to chair this year’s Goldsmiths Prize – the £10,000 award created by Goldsmiths, University of London, in association with the New Statesman, to reward “boldly original fiction”. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2016-01-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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"Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it," wrote renowned computer scientist Alan Perlis. Anyone who has examined the landscape of the advertising technology industry can appreciate this sentiment. While the computer scientists who create the code we... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2015-12-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The shortlist for the Goldsmiths Prize 2015 has been revealed today (1st October) with the finalists "embodying the spirit of invention." Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Author Ali Smith has said the Goldsmiths Prize, which is now in its third year, has encouraged publishers to take risks. The prize, awarded to bold and inventive fiction, was won by Smith last year for How to be Both (Hamish Hamilton). Smith said of the prize: “The change it’s made is that... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-09-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Children’s Books Ireland (CBI) is hoping to get kids across the country reading in October through the "Read Everywhere in 2015", campaign. For the campaign, also known as "Níl Turas Níos Fearr Ná Turas le Leabhar!" in Irish, CBI will run a range of activities, including a "The Danger is... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-09-22 00:00:00 UTC ]
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EL James and Rachel Abbott take the ebook top spots as self-published success spreads on Amazon’s e-reader Related: Rachel Abbott: 'Self-publishing means the success of my books is entirely down to me' Five years ago, Rachel Abbott was retired. Today, she has been named the most popular... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2015-08-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Jason's first story collection since 2013's 'Lost Cat' fuses pop culture, heart break, and surrealism in stories that imagine Frida Kahlo as a hitwoman and thieves straight out of Magritte. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2015-07-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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As the first full day of Comic-Con unfolded in San Diego, one of the biggest stories is the continuing push, from publishers, to release more diverse material for a wider audience. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2015-07-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake, published by crowd-funding platform Unbound, has been named the inaugural Book of the Year at the Bookseller Industry Awards 2015. The book is written in re-imagined old English and set in 1066, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Folio Prize,... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-05-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The 2015 Salon London Transmission Prize has been split between two winners this year– Margaret Heffernan and Julian Baggini. The winners were both given a case of vintage wine awarded at a Big Ideas Salon at Foyles flagship Charing Cross Road London bookshop tonight (12th February). The... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-02-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Catapult will launch in fall 2015, with Padgett Powell's story collection, 'Cries for Help, Various.' Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2015-02-03 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Novelist Ali Smith has won the Goldsmiths Prize, awarded for "boldly original" fiction. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2014-11-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Novelist Ali Smith has won the Goldsmiths Prize, awarded for "boldly original" fiction. Smith won the £10,000 award, now in its second year, for How to be Both (Hamish Hamilton), the two-part novel which lost out to Richard Flanagan on the shortlist for this year's Man Booker. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2014-11-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Last week we dropped my two sons off at their first overnight camp. They are 9 and 11. They will spend almost a month there, and we will be here, at home, feeling weird about things. Since the only way I can communicate with them is by mail, and since one of my favorite Slate pieces this year... Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2014-06-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Celebrating great writing by women and taking it to a wider audience than ever before are the... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2014-02-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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A new collection of contemporary short stories by Man Booker Prize-winning Hilary Mantel –... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2014-01-16 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Irish author Ciara Geraghty (her first name's pronounced "Keira") started writing when she was 34 and hasn't stopped since, despite the advent of children and husband. Ciara writes novels that are light and laced with humour (she rightly rejects the label "chick lit") despite hefty subject... Continue reading at Stuff
[ Stuff | 2013-02-26 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Ebooks will bring Cuba's isolated publishing industry and authors to a wider audience across the Spanish-speaking world, but also the US, under the radar of the trade embargo. Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives
[ Publishing Perspectives | 2012-12-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Some well-kept secrets at Penguin Group, most notably the succession plan for its CEO, were put on display late Wednesday with the filing of an age discrimination lawsuit by the book publisher's former longtime head of corporate communications, Marilyn Ducksworth. Her lawyers charge Penguin with... Continue reading at Crains New York
[ Crains New York | 2012-09-07 00:00:00 UTC ]
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