AS Byatt and John Carey win James Tait

AS Byatt has won this year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Children's Book. Manager and judge of the fiction prize Professor Colin Nicholson said of it :

The literary qualities and sheer entertainment value of the work we have been sifting are convincing evidence that fiction and biography of the highest standards are thriving in an evidently buoyant sector of our culture.

The other four novels competing for the fiction prize were:  

Strangers by Anita Brookner
Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel 
The Selected Works of TS Spivet by Reif Larsen.

The prize for the best biography went to John Carey for William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord Of The Flies. 

Body2Body Snatchers

The Home Ministry has apparently seized* three copies of the Body 2 Body: A Malaysian Queer Anthology published last year, from KL book store, Kinokuniya, Patrick Lee reports.

Publisher Amir Muhammad commented :

They just walk into a shop and take the copies ... They don't want to go through the whole legal process (of banning the book). ... It's kind of ironic, (as) a month ago I decided not to reprint the book.

The book has sold more than 2,900 copies to date, so talk about making a gesture to shut the stable door after the horse has ... not just bolted, but disappeared over the horizon.

Lee points out that :

Amir is no stranger to the government's book-grabbing tendencies. ... In February this year, nine copies of his political satire title, “Malaysian Politicians Say the Darndest Things (Vol 2)” were seized by police officers from MPH Mahkota Parade in Malacca.

I must say that one doesn't know whether to laugh or to cry when this kind of thing happens. One way or another, we all get to read the books we want to read, and Malaysian voices will out.  But the fact that any book gets seized reminds us that Big Brother State is always there to attempt to trample those voices.

Anyway, Amir has some other good things going on to take his mind off all this.  The first edition of his new book 120 Malay Movies is all but sold out (Amir, please save me a copy!!). He has two more books on the best-seller list. And now he's steaming ahead with a book on his take of the Malay classic Sejarah Melayu. (Chapter One is here.)

Postscript :

Back to splitting semantic hairs.  Christine Chan writes in Malaysiakini :

The Home Ministry's Publications Control and Quranic Text secretary Zaitun Ab Samad said that the books entitled Body 2 Body, published by Amir Muhammad, have not been seized, rather only taken to undergo scrutiny.

"Taken" or "seized"? 

The first word is too innocuous (the stores have no choice but to let the books go so there is an element of  compulsion which "take" - sorry Pn Zaiton - does not cover).  "Seized" may yes, be too strong, a bit dramatic, but "confiscated", which is probably better, makes us think of school.  The books (we know from past form) will not be paid for, not returned after they have been "examined".  If the books were only for study then why on earth would three copies need to be taken??

Postscript to Postscript :

 Hazlan Zakaria gets round it nicely by using the word "appropriated"!

A Book on a Poster

Here's a neat idea - a poster of which features the entire text of a favourite book, arranged to form a picture which depicts a memorable scene.  Can you guess which novels are depicted below? [via The Millions]

Summer Shorts

The Guardian features five short stories from established authors : Hilary Mantel, Barabara Trepido, Roddy Doyle, David Mitchell and Téa Obreht, as well as one from the winner from their short story competition and five runners up in their Summer Fiction Special.

Ban Books - Boost Sales!

Bizarrely, (withholding the books) probably meant we sold more books. We wouldn’t have done this well otherwise ...

Palgrave Macmillan executive director for East Asia, Steve Maginn, talks to Starmag's Elizabeth Tai about the seizure of Barry Wain's Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times, and the way it (ironically) boosted sales when the book was finally released.

Elsewhere, Tunku Halim reviews the book ... and suggests we should look past the lost RM50bil.  Myself, I don't feel that allegation can or should be swept under the carpet.

Better Book Titles

What a great idea - a website :

... for people who have trouble slogging through the information on book jackets or feel intimidated by the title and cover itself.

Dan Wilbur retitles famous novels to give you the lowdown on them.  Above are are a couple of my favourites.  (Of course you spotted that they were of A Clockwork Orange and Ulysses, respectively.)

(Found via a tweet from ubudwritersfest.)

Wena at Bedtime

Singaporean author Wena Poon's first novel Alex y Robert is published on 24th August in the UK.  The Salt Publishing blog captures the behind the scenes excitement.

And this is especially great - the BBC is featuring it as a Book at Bedtime.:

The book has been abridged and turned into a 5-part script and auditions are underway to find a reader (the programme’s Producer, Jeremy Osborne from Sweet Productions, says that this process isn’t the easiest from a technical point of view. Read the book and you’ll find out why!). The recording studio is booked for the week of the 16th August (Wena and I are hoping to pop along to see how it all works) and — diaries out now, please, pens poised — broadcast dates are set for the 6th – 17th September, Mondays – Fridays on BBC Radio 4.
It will also be available online on the BBC iPlayer, so wherever you are in the world, you’ll be able to tune in and be guaranteed sweet dreams.

All this activity is so exciting; as Wena says: ‘Imagine actors auditioning, producers producing, casting directors casting!’ Add to that, millions of people lying in bed listening and readers reading. Wonderful!
Share and Enjoy:

The premise of the book sounds very interesting :

In 1959, two famous Spanish matadors, who were best friends, died. Alex y Robert is the witty, modern fable of their grandchildren: Alejandra, a young American woman determined to become a matador, and Roberto, a reluctant star Spanish bullfighter whom she recruits to help her. Part travel adventure, part cultural critique, the novel portrays man’s complex relationship with animals and a new generation’s surprising take on an ancient and controversial spectacle.

I'm sure we all wish Wena - and Salt - good luck with the book.

Ishiguro's Story for London Film Fest

One of the films I'm looking forward to is the screen version of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel about the implications of human cloning - Never Let Me Go.  The screen version stars Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield and is apparently set to open this year's London Film Festival.

David Gritten in The Telegraph writes :

I make this confident prediction because I’ve already seen the film selected to open the LFF. Never Let Me Go is a perfect example of British film at its very best; it’s a sombre piece of work, yet its sheer quality will lift the gloomiest of spirits.

I so loved the book, and this trailer has really whetted my appetite for the movie version :

If The Secret Worked - Why a Sequel?

One of the sad parts of that [people taking it seriously] is then they blame themselves when they fail to achieve all the money, the perfect relationships, the perfect health that was promised, because if they don't achieve it they are not trying hard enough, they are not focusing their thoughts well enough ... In this way of thinking, there is no such thing as economic conditions that are condemning many people to hard lives; there is no such thing as diseases that strike people independently of how nice their thoughts are; there is no room for earthquakes, tsunamis, oil spills, any kind of disaster, because anything that happens we really have brought on ourselves.

You will instantly recognise that the book that Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World is talking about :  Rhoda Byrnes pernicious little book The Secret.

Kate Youde in The Independent quotes Ehrenreich (whose book, I must say, sounds like one I want to read!) talks about how Byrne's latest book, The Power, is predicted to be even more successful (if  by "success" your are referring to numbers of copies and amount of money made), than The Secret :

 ... facts

19 million number of books sold worldwide

2 million copies of the DVD sold around the globe

32 number of languages the DVD is available in, including Turkish, Bulgarian and Icelandic

286,0000 number of fans on Facebook

1 where the book came on The New York Times bestseller list in March 2007. The film was also number one on Amazon.com's DVD chart in 2007

We talked about this book some time back and readers of this blog couldn't come up with a single instance of Byrnes' hokum actually working, but there's little doubt that gullible readers in Malaysia will snap this up.

Not Quite So Blonde

Wasn't Marilyn Monroe the prototype blonde bimbo?  Well actually, no.

Susie Mesure writes in The Independent that a collection of Munroe's writings entitled Fragments :

.. reveals her passion for James Joyce, Walt Whitman and Samuel Beckett ... She had a vast library, which included works by George Bernard Shaw, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, D H Lawrence, F Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck, as well as Joyce, which she took with her whenever she moved house, something she did many times over her short lifetime. Her copy of Ulysses fetched $9,200 (£5,800) at an auction of her possessions by Christie's in 1999. While in Hollywood, she briefly took evening courses in art appreciation and literature at UCLA before withdrawing after her presence proved too distracting for the other students.

And she also had, apparently : 

... a flair for writing words as well as speaking them.

This is a book I'm waiting for!
(* to be published this Autumn by Editions du Seuil in France and U.S. publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Sellerating Away!

I was very happy to receive my copy of  Clutch, Brake, Sellarator - the compilation of the winning entries for last year's MPH Short Story Competition, for which I was one of the judges. Encountering the stories again reminded me of the morning all those months ago the six of us battled it out over the 20 stories that had been shortlisted for us. And I have to point out that anything I say in this post reflects my own views and not necessarily those of the judging panel as a whole.

There were, you will remember, two grand prize winners.

Tan Twan Eng's  Some Things Will Remain set the bar for the competition very high indeed (as you would expect from a Booker-longlisted author) I loved the control of the piece - not a word is wasted and the story builds and builds to its heart-stopping climax while the peace and beauty of the setting, a lotus-covered lake, contrasts so starkly with the ugliness of the crime. I appreciated too how much is left unsaid, for the reader to bring their own interpretation of events to the story. 

The title story by Ivan Yeo was enjoyed by all the judges for its humour, carefully observed characters (we particularly loved the "not girlfriend"), and strong Malaysian voice. However,  I must confess that I found it a little over-written in places and I personally had a problem with the sudden change of mood at the end which seemed out of keeping with the rest.  But it is a very strong debut piece and I do hope that Ivan keeps writing : control and craft can be learned, but the strong storyteller is there already.

Of the runners-up, the story I thought strongest was Lee Eeleen's The Englishman at Table 19. It is simultaneously a coming-of-age tale, a ghost story, and a comedy exploring the family holiday from hell: it works very well on all these levels.

Pilling Time is a surreal short story by Shih Li Kow which the judges enjoyed very much.  It was very nicely written (and would we expect any less from Shih-Li?)  but I have to say that I preferred her more "rooted-in-the real-world" pieces in Ripples.

The Hunter and the Tigress by Zed Adam Idris is a dark and magical story which captures the smell and feel of the Malaysian rainforest. It's disturbing (I found particularly chilling the scene where the tiger design on the plate begins to move and bites the hand of the man trying to steal it) and it doesn’t give easy answers.  I was interested to see in the notes in the front of the book that this piece had grown from a short short story - because I've told Zed that it feels as if it needs to grow larger still and perhaps become a novella.

Vincent Foo's The Cobra's Mate is set in Sarawak.  I liked that there was plenty of action  and that the writer manages to maintain tension. I was fascinated by the insights into the dayak culture of the time.  
 

The competition has, I think, been very important in opening up another avenue for local writers, and in encouraging short story writing, and this collection is well worth a read.   I'm looking forward to next year so I can send in an entry myself!

A Quick Freshen-Up

Apologies for leaving you high and dry for the last few days. I've been busy, distracted, entertaining relatives, getting on with some other writing, plain lazy ... yes, all of the above.

I also realised that my blog was becoming very difficult to navigate as it was and looked cluttered. Somehow I'd lost my archives, my tags were underutilised by visitors(though all point to good past stuff), and some of my links were dead.

So I am trying a new, less-cluttered layout and hope that it is easier on the eye and more navigable.

Have a poke around and let me know what you think. Normal service, as they say, will be resumed as soon as possible.