Pignapped

(Warning - non-halal post.)

What do you do if you feel that the results of a literary award are :

... a stitch-up ...

(the winner announced before the shortlist is out) and the author you really feel deserves to win a particular literary prize doesn't? How about running off with the prize and holding it randsome as a protest and so that the judges are forced to reconsider their choice?

And what if the prize includes a Gloucester Old Spot pig to be named after the winning novel?

What would P.G. Wodehouse himself have done? What would his hero Bertie Wooster have done? Julian Gough tells the story of a pignapping, and the whole event is caught on video too :



The book Gough wanted to win is a wonderful novella called The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett which I so thoroughly enjoyed, that it seems a good opportunity to slip in a mention.

It's the story of how the Queen, out walking her corgis one morning, comes across a strange little van parked in the grounds of Buckingham Palace. It turns out to be a mobile library, patronised by the members of her household staff. She goes in to apologise for the trouble caused by her dogs, but finds herself taking out a novel ... and after she returns it, another ... and then another. And pretty soon a total hopeless bookaddict is born.

The queen's public duties suffer as her passion for reading grows. Worse still, she finds herself asking difficult questions about her role as monarch.

(Read an extract from the novella.)

Shakespeare and Monkey Win Awards

The Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction was last night carried off, not by Alan Bennet's Untold Stories, as many had expected, but by a biography partly inspired by the film Shakespeare in Love. American academic James Shapiro's 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare was described by Peter Kemp in his Sunday Times review as :

... the product of marathon scholarship, inspired insight, narrative flair, astute surmise and searching intelligence ... (it) brings Shakespeare’s outer and inner worlds, and the interplay between them, alive with such thrilling immediacy

Meanwhile, poet Nick Laird has won the Betty Trask Award for his "lad-lit novel" Utterly Monkey.

A reviewer in the Independent describes it as:

'a novel that combines lad-lit staples – car chases, pub crawls and beautiful women – with grown-up savoir faire.'

On Writer's Block

I never use the phrase. I don't think of it as writer's block. You just look out the window a bit more.

Alan Bennett (quoted in the Independent 29/7/05)

Being Bennett

Alan Bennett is a writer I love for his humanity, sense of voice and sheer audacity. Perhaps if my fairy godmother waved her wand at me and asked me which writer I'd most like to be, I'd choose to be Bennett for those very qualities. (Yes, even over Annie Proulx!)

I didn't manage to catch all five of hisTalking Heads monologues serialised by the BBC, but they were extremely funny and well observed. I love his long short stories The Clothes They Stood Up In and The Laying on of Hands, as well as his account of an elderly lady who parked her van in front of his house and proceeded to live there for several years.

Now Bennett has a new book out, Untold Stories, about his mother's mental illness. Reading this extract from the Telegraph struck a chord, became my mother too began to imagine that there were spies everywhere (tapping the phone, intercepting the mail, everything a plot against her or her family - even my husband losing a legal case across the world in Malaysia was her fault according to her warped logic).

Bennett's mother suffered from depression, a condition which Bennett says is largely ignored by the medical profession:

Depression, which is much the most common mental illness, doesn't even qualify as such and mustn't be so labelled, perhaps because it's routine and relatively unshowy; but maybe, too, because it's so widespread not calling depression mental illness helps to sidestep the stigma.

It makes me deeply angry that any kind of mental illness carries a stigma because it makes it so hard for suffers to seek the treatment they need. This is a corner I would love to fight myself, and I'm glad that Bennett is writing about it.

Postscript:

More on Bennett's new book from the Guardian.