Hilary Mantel

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Hilary Mantel: good news and bad news

First the bad news.  Hilary Mantel’s publishers HarperCollins have all but confirmed what many feared; that The Mirror and the Light, Mantel’s much anticipated conclusion to her Booker Prize winning Thomas Cromwell Trilogy is unlikely to appear in 2016.  To be fair, what they said was that the book was “tentatively expected” but that there was no set publication…

Lost for words? There’s a great big world out there

For author and historian Hilary Mantel it is nesh. For Aminatta Forna it is plitter. WhileSturt34 Nina Stibbe goes all goosey over fetlocks. They are among the writers who contributed their favourites to words we love compiled by The Guardian. Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the words come from the writers early upbringing or cultural background.  Neel Mukherjee says he believes every Anglo-Indian knows only too painfully the expression tight slap: “A tight slap is when the hitting palm makes full and satisfying contact with the cheek being hit. No slippage resulting from the face being turned away or trying to dodge, none of the unsatisfactory business of only the fingers making contact instead of the entire hitting palm; full connectivity, in other words. He puts it in the same class of words as chokra-boy (a young male servant or ne’er-do-well), and baba-log (the word Anglo-Indians used of their children when talking to their nannies).

Longlist of best historical novels released

photoAnd the Oscar goes to … oops, sorry, wrong golden moment. Just as the stars were celebrating winning an illustrious bald statue, 15 authors were having their own, quieter, moment of pleasure having been named on the longlist for the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. Sir Walter Scott, the Scottish novelist and poet, is considered by many a founding father of the historical novel with Ivanhoe, one of the collection known as the Waverley Novels, amongst his most famous books.

In coming up with the award longlist, which increased from 12 last year, the judges did a considerable amount of time travelling from 11th Century England (The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth) to 17th Century Amsterdam (The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton) to 20th Century Europe (The Zone by Martin Amis) and  occasionally, even further afield. The shortlist will be announced next month with the final winner being revealed at the Borders Book Festival in June. Previous winners are: Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall), Andrea Levy (The Long Story), Sebastian Barry (On Canaan’s Side), Tan Twan Eng (The Garden of Evening Mists) and Robert Harris (An Officer and a Spy).

The full long list is:

Stellar line-up for Sunday Times short story award finalists

Lilies and bookIt’s great to see short stories as a genre go from strength to strength with a stellar line up for the Sunday Times annual  short story award. Among the longlist are Elizabeth Strout who won the Pulitzer Prize for the wonderful Olive Kitteridge, Marjorie Celona, whose debut novel Y, won several awards, and M J Hyland, who was shortlisted for the Man Booker. Previous winners of award, which carries a prize of £30,000, making it the world’s prize for a short story, include Junot Diaz, Hilary Mantel, Mark Haddon and  CK Stead.

The shortlist will be announced on March 2, with the winner revealed in early April. All six shortlisted stories will be available on an ebook from March 2. The full line-up is listed below or go to thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/public/stefg.  (artwork by Sturt Krygsman)

Eat, Pray, Analyse: Elizabeth Gilbert on Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and writing historical fiction that is not “Dickensian”

Based on the theory that good writers are interested in, and knowledgeable about,  other good writers and writing, The Wall Street Journal has started a new book club where a different author will each month analyse the work of a fellow-writer. This month, Elizabeth Gilbert, famous for her Eat, Pray, Love,  says that her big fear when…

Who will make the Booker Long List 2013?

The hype that always surrounds the prestigious Booker  Prize has already begun with the news that the Long List for 2013 will be announced on July 25th.

Last year’s list provided some treasurers. Apart from winner Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists was probably my favorite read of the year and a book that everyone to whom I recommended it seems to have enjoyed too, Other memorable ones are Swimming Home by Deborah Levy, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce, The Lighthouse by Alison Moore and Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil.

It’s a big deal, for reputation and sales, to make it onto even the Long List of what is one of the world’s most prestigious literary competitions. So, who will make it into the spotlight in 2013? Apart from the judges, my guess is as good as any, so here are some possible contenders.

TransAtlantic by Colum McCann: McCann’s novel, is divided into a series of narratives

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