For author and historian Hilary Mantel it is nesh. For Aminatta Forna it is plitter. While
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).
Stella Prize finalists reveal the inspiration behind their books
Joan London (right) wanted to write about the 1950s, “the time of her childhood.” Emily Biffo
wanted to write about a group of people attempting to separate themselves from mainstream culture. And Elen Van Neervan wanted to ask questions about Indigenous governance in Australia, and issues like land rights, identity and love. Each of the six finalists for the Stella Prize for Fiction, the winner of which will be announced next week, has explained the inspiration behind their shortlisted books in a series of revealing interviews with The Guardian.
Maxine Beneba Clark whose collection of short stories Foreign Soil is published by
Hachette, said she was looking at “people trying to find a place for themselves in the world – about the search for a true place to call home, about the things we gain when we migrate, and the all-consuming heartache of our leaving, even as we find the very things we’re looking for”.
Washington Post and The Guardian win Pulitzer Prize for Edward Snowden spy leaks story
The Washington Post and The Guardian have been awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service for their coverage of the Edward Snowden spy leaks controversy. The citation for The Washington Post said it had won the Prize “for its revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, marked by…
What reviewers are saying about George Eliot, Margaret Drabble, Janet Frame and the importance of grammar this weekend
“The book was reading me, as I was reading it,” writes Rebecca Mead of her experience of Middlemarch by George Eliot, a book that was published almost 100 years before Mead was born, yet one that for her couldn’t have felt more relevant and urgent. The Road to Middlemarch, which…