Costa for Colm

The Costa Book Awards have been announced.

Colm Tóibín beat out strong competition including Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall to take the Novel Award for Brooklyn. As Mark Brown in The Guardian points out, the author he is "something of a bridesmaid" where major awards are concerned, with many near misses in major literary prizes.

Brooklyn is described as :

... a sparely written account of a young woman's emigration from 1950s Ireland to New York

and the judges called it :

Poised, quiet and incrementally shattering - we all loved this book and can't praise it highly enough.

Read more about the book here. The Guardian has an extract from the novel up, here, and you can read reviews here, here, and here.

The first novel award was taken by Raphael Selbourne for Beauty which the judges said :

Captures the raw humanity of inner city life with extraordinary authenticity.

The novel, which marks another success for the independent Tindal Street Press, is about :

... a naive young Bengali woman living in Wolverhampton who finds herself ostracised by her family after a failed arranged marriage.

You can read more about it here and here.

Other winners were Christopher Reid in the poetry category for A Scattering; Graham Farmelo for The Strangest Man his life of quantum physicist Paul Dirac; while Patrick Ness won the children's book award for The Ask and the Answer.

Just Slit Your Wrists and Bleed on the Page

No enjoyment. No, none.

says Colm Toibin when asked by M.J. Highland which of his novels he enjoyed writing most, in an interview at The Manchester Review [via]. (The whole thing is altogether so fascinating I urge the writers among you to read it). :

Oh there’s no pleasure. Except that I don’t have to work for anyone who bullies me. I write with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult and this means, I think, that pleasure is out of the question. I would associate this with narcissism anyway and I would disapprove of it.

And he says that he came close to breakdown when writing certain passages.

The best thing about writing, he says, is the money (!), though clearly he is an author who has no choice but to write :

Because I have things that will not go away. Some of them are true, some slowly become imagined. They do not disappear just because I write them. If I don’t write them, I find that suddenly I am writing them. They make their way into sentences and I feel a need to finish what I began, to formalise it and then publicise it. I emphasise that it heals nothing.

Is writing for a living a joy or a chore for other authors? On The Guardian blog nine novelists, including A. L. Kennedy, Joyce Carol Oates, and Amit Chaudhari talk about their feelings re the process.

Most don't find writing a barrel load of laughs. Though Will Self declares:

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte.

There is some lively discussion from the blog readers, many of whom don't seem terribly impressed with whingy writers!

BTW, there really is so much good stuff to read in the second edition of The Manchester Review. Do go read.

Desk Space

Following the sale of Dicken's desk the other day, Jane Sullivan in The Age meditates on our continuing fascination with the writer's desk. (How would you explain this vicarious interest?)

She mentions the ongoing series in The Writer's Room in The Guardian (not online - and I really hope there an eventual book) in which author's writing spaces are photographed :

Andrew O'Hagan is clearly proud of his desk's Dickensian connection: it used to belong to a Victorian lawyer's office in Doughty Street in London, next door to Dickens' place. O'Hagan has a "crazily tidy" room and he confesses to obsessive-compulsive tendencies: "Every day I write up the two or three biggest priorities on the blackboard, and, even if the tasks aren't completed, I wipe the board clean when I knock off."

Other writers are much messier. Clutter is the norm. Very few writers go in for state-of-the-art technology or cutting-edge design: most workspaces look like modest makeshift converted bedrooms or student rooms. They are crammed with books, family pictures, children's creations or mementoes of past triumphs that David Lodge describes as "ego salve". The authors often avoid PCs, bashing out their books on typewriters or getting down first drafts in longhand. There are quite a few huge, horrible chairs for bad backs. Some like a room with a view: others prefer a blank wall.

Colm Toibin thinks of his room as a cave: "I have left instructions that I would like to be buried here when I die or a bit before, the cave bricked up." His chair is one of the most uncomfortable ever made: "After a day's work, it causes pain in parts of the body you did not know existed. It keeps me awake."

Some writers don't have a designated workspace, or even a desk. A. L. Kennedy lies down on a monster black leather chair with her laptop in her lap, in a room the colour of blood.

The literary relic with the most resonance for her, she says is Henry Lawson's pen.

2004: The Year of Henry James

How would you feel if you wrote a novel about a famous historical character, only to find that another novelist had chosen exactly the same subject and even focused on the very same period of his life?

Poor David Lodge! He did not realise until after he'd finished his Author, Author that Colm Toibin had also written a novel about Henry James, the highly acclaimed, The Master.

Lodge must have felt pretty gutted as he saw more critical praise heaped on his rival's novel than on his, along with nominations for the top awards. (And of course, The Master won the IMPAC Prize.)

Lodge has now written The Year of Henry James, in which he looks back on the experience. But he still hasn't managed to bring himself to pick up Toibin's book, he says.

Was there something in the air or in the water in 2004, that made the world suddenly go mad for Henry James? As this piece in the Telegraph points out:

There were no features in Vanity Fair, no editorial columns, and no heated discussions in pubs. But among writers, everything went a bit James. ... Four Jamesian novels came out within months of each other: biographical works by Colm Tóibín and David Lodge, and more tangential novels from Alan Hollinghurst and Toby Litt (The Line of Beauty and Ghost Story). How should one respond to this synchronicity, other than to accept it as proof that novelists are not only cut off from the wider world, but that they are cut off in the same kind of way?

James has always been a writer's writer and I think the apparent synchronicity reflects a desire for a return to a kind of elegant craftsmanship that seems to have fallen by the wayside in modern fiction writing.

Time to reread the master himself!

Masterful Toibin Wins IMPAC

It was pretty much on the cards that Irish writer Colm Toibin would take the IMPAC Dublin Prize for The Master, which received more library nominations than any other book. And yesterday, he did.

The novel is a portrayal of 19th-century novelist and critic Henry James, which the judges praised for its "crisp, modulated writing". They said:

[The book's] preoccupations are truth and the elusiveness of intimacy, and from such preoccupations emerge this patient, beautiful exposure of loss and the price of the pursuit of perfection.

Related Post:

Award Fatigue (9/4/06)

Scary Stuff

The Visitor tells me that the world is going to end tomorrow (06/6/06) so it might be a suitable occasion to write about some chilling reads. (I like to be topical.)

Terence Rafferty in the New York Times ponders the attraction of horror stories in The Thinking Reader's Guide to Fear and goes on to list some of the latest and best supernatural fiction.

Meanwhile, Colm Toibin in the Guardian writes about one of the most chilling stories ever written: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, which was filmed in 1961 as The Innocents (left) and utterly totally terrified me as a child.

Anyway, take comfort: the world can't end tomorrow because they're announcing the winner of the Orange Prize.


Related Posts:

Satanic Synchronicity 29/4/05)
The Comforts of Horror (31/5/06)

Award Fatigue

Ho hum. I'm not a very good litblogger because I suffer from Literary Award fatigue. There are just so many longlists, shortlists, winners, that one can blog about ... but that's a shameful admission because these lists serve as useful reading guides for anyone who wants to be a bit more adventurous in their reading and get out of the sticking-with-familiar-writers-rut.

But if there seem to be more such lists around than there used to be - there probably are. Apparently even the Booker committee hadn't used to announce it's longlist (and now that they do I feel oliged to buy and read the whole bloody lot and severe bookguilt if I miss any out). It's probably true for the other awards as well. And of course, there are more awards these days.

Anyway. The shortlist for the Dublin-based 2006 IMPAC prize was announced a few days ago. It's a very interesting literary prize since it is open to authors of any nationality and written in any language, provided they have been published in English translation, and thus casts its net a lot more widely than other literary awards. The longlist is actually nominated by libraries across the world, and you may remember that I picked up a controversy about the librarians in some countries (inc. Malaysia) nominating a title by a national writer rather than for the best book of the year.

Thankfully librarians from elsewhere seem to have been clearer on the concept and less kiasu: the original longlist of 132 books has now been whittled down to a shortlist of just 10 titles. And the nominations are:

• Graceland by Chris Abani
• Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam
• Havoc, In Its Third Year by Ronan Bennett
• The Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe
• An Altered Light by Jens Christian Grondahl - translated from the Danish by Anne Born
• The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra - translated from the French by John Cullen
• Breaking the Tongue by Vyvyane Loh
• Don't Move by Margaret Mazzantini - translated from the Italian by John Cullen
• The Master by Colm Tóibín
• The Logogryph by Thomas Wharton

The Master by Colm Toibin was nominated by no less than 17 libraries across the world, so I'd put my money on that horse if I were a betting person.

The winner will be announced on July 14 2006.

While I'm on the subject of shortlists and the best of world literature, let me apologise for not linking to this piece on the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shortlist which was announced back in March. This prize is entirely for works in translation - and that's all to the good since we often just don't hear about the best books from the rest of the world.

This award will be presented on the 2nd May.

Enough awards for one day, though I can think of several others I should have blogged about. With any luck you won't even notice which they are ...