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.

Costa Shortlists

The shortlists for the various categories of the Costa Prize have been announced, and here's the full list :

Costa First Novel Award

• The Finest Type of English Womanhood by Rachel Heath
  
• John the Revelator by Peter Murphy
  
• Beauty by Raphael Selbourne
  
• The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw
  

Costa Novel Award

• Family Album by Penelope Lively
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
• The Elephant Keeper by Christopher Nicholson
• Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

Costa Biography Award

• The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo
• The Music Room by William Fiennes
• Coda by Simon Gray
• Dancing to the Precipice by Caroline Moorehead

Costa Poetry Award

• Angels Over Elsinore by Clive James
• One Eye'd Leigh by Katharine Kilalea
• Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel
• A Scattering by Christopher Reid

Costa Children's Award

• Solace of the Road by Siobhan Dowd
• Troubadour by Mary Hoffman
• The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness
• Guantanamo Boy by Anna Perera

Two of the authors on the list, Simon Gray and Siobhan Dowd have been nominated posthumously.

More at The Independent, and you can find links to all the nominated books here.

The winners in each category will be announced on January 5th and the overall Book of the Year on January 25th.

Barry for Costa

Irish novelist Sebastian Barry takes this year's Costa Prize for The Secret Scripture ... despite most of the judges feeling that the book was deeply flawed and almost none of them liking the ending!

What redeemed it? According to Matthew Parris, chair of the final judges:

Sebastian Barry has created one of the great narrative voices in contemporary fiction in The Secret Scripture. It is a book of great brilliance, powerfully and beautifully written.

The novel tells the story of Roseanne McNulty, a very old woman living in a mental institution and secretly writing her memoirs in an attempt to reclaim her past. Her narrative is interwoven with that of her psychiatrist, Dr Grene, whose:

...own sense of self becomes entangled with the fate of this mysterious old lady.

The novel was earlier shortlisted for the Booker prize.

Postscript :

All literature is flawed, everything creative is by its nature flawed ...

says Lisa Jewell, one of the Costa judges, in The Telegraph, explaining that Barry's book :

... was, quite simply, magic.

In the same paper, Robert Colville asks why the judges are so grudging in their praise, but seems to rather welcome their honesty!

Postscript 2 :

As James Delingpole so rightly points out in The Telegraph:

And their shining example of the novel that isn't flawed is what exactly? All novels are flawed, that's the whole point. Dickens goes on a bit as – my, and how! – does George Eliot; War and Peace ends with 100 pages of rambling, esoteric spiritual drivel; Proust badly needs pruning; Dan Brown and Jeffrey Archer aren't great prose stylists. ... As a novelist it's the first – and most depressing – thing you learn about your trade: that between the sweeping ambition of your conception and the reality of your execution there will always be a terrifyingly large gulf. All novels, even the greatest ones, are failures. It's just that most readers are too polite to notice.

The Costa Winning!

The category winners for the Costa (formerly Whitbread) Book Awards have been announced. The headlines of course have been grabbed by former publisher Diana Athill's win for Somewhere Towards The End in the biography section - she's 91 years old! Judges called the book :

... a perfect memoir of old age – candid, detailed, charming, totally lacking in self-pity or sentimentality and above all, beautifully, beautifully written ...

Sebastian Barry won the best novel prize with The Secret Scripture, which many feel should have won this year's Booker. Michelle Magorian won the children's book award with Just Henry, of which the judges said :

Just Henry is a soaring, uplifting warm bath of a book – a wonderful roller-coaster of a story which we all absolutely loved.

Sadie Jones took the Best First Novel Award for The Outcast, while Adam Foulds, who won the poetry prize for The Broken Word, which is about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya.

It is a rare achievement to write a poetry book that the reader simply can't put down. Readers of poetry and fiction alike will be swept along by its chilling narrative.

The overall winner will be announced on January 27.

Costa's Fiction 2008 Lists

It certainly seems to be literary award season. The shortlist for the Costa was announced on Tuesday.

The contenders for best novel in 2008 are :

Sebastian Barry - The Secret Scripture

Chris Cleave - The Other Hand

Louis de Bernières - A Partisan's Daughter

Patrick McGrath - Trauma

and the 2008 Costa first novel award shortlist :

Poppy Adams - The Behaviour of Moths

Sadie Jones's - The Outcast

Tom Rob Smith - Child 44

Jennie Rooney's - Inside the Whale

There are also shortlists for biography, poetry and children's fiction which you can find on the website, along with information about each title. and the authors.

Sebastian Barry seems to be the favourite for the fiction prize, which is understandable, given that he also reached the shortlist for the Booker. Tom Rob Smith's Child 44 was of course longlisted for the same prize.

The winners will be announced 6th January 2009.

We Still Love Blyton!

A survey carried out to mark the 2008 Costa Book Awards has revealed that Enid Blyton tops the list of Britain's "most cherished and best-loved writers".

Blyton's gold medal position in this table, along with the high preponderance of children's writers elsewhere on Costa's list (Roald Dahl took second place and JK Rowling third, while JRR Tolkien and Beatrix Potter made the top 10), is evidence that it is the books we read, wholeheartedly, passionately, uncritically, in childhood to which we remain most firmly and irrevocably attached. The flaws we see in them as adults, the criticisms - and some pretty hefty ones, in the shape of accusations of sexism, racism and class snobbery have been flung Blyton's way over the years - do not weaken those bonds. For hundreds of thousands of us, Blyton was the wedge that cracked open the pleasure-filled world of reading and allowed us in. Our rational adult sides reject and mock Kirrin Island and all the adventures played out there; our inner children remember it rightly, and gratefully, as the promontory from which we caught our first glimpse of the promised land.

writes Lucy Mangan in the Guardian. I've certainly acknowledged my own debt to Blyton who got me reading! The full list of most loved authors is here :

1. Enid Blyton 2. Roald Dahl 3. J.K. Rowling 4. Jane Austen 5. William Shakespeare 6. Charles Dickens 7. J.R.R. Tolkien 8. Agatha Christie 9. Stephen King 10. Beatrix Potter 11. C.S. Lewis 12. Catherine Cookson 13. Martina Cole 14. Bill Bryson 15. Charlotte Bronte 16. Jacqueline Wilson 17. Oscar Wilde 18. Maeve Binchy 19. Dan Brown 20. Emily Bronte 21. Jackie Collins 22. Martin Amis 23. Isaac Asimov 24. Margaret Atwood 25. John Grisham 26. Marian Keyes 27. H.G.Wells 28. Alan Bennett 29. Arthur C. Clarke 30. George Orwell 31. Danielle Steel 32. Iain Banks 33. Judy Blume 34. Jodi Picoult 35. Arthur Conan Doyle 36. Peter Ackroyd 37. Kingsley Amis 38. P.G Wodehouse 39. Dr. Seuss 40. Mark Twain 41. J.G. Ballard 42. Thomas Hardy 43. James Patterson 44. Ian Rankin 45. Leo Tolstoy 46. Irvine Welsh 47. Jilly Cooper 48. Beryl Bainbridge 49. Ray Bradbury 50. Geoffrey Chaucer

Kennedy's Big Day

Scottish author A. L. Kennedy has emerged the overall winner of the 2007 Costa Prize (narrowly beating Catherine O'Flynn). Her novel Day is about the after effects of war, and was written as a response to the invasion of Iraq and she says she set out to draw parallels, and highlight the difference in morality, between the two conflicts.

Day centres on a traumatised second world war tail gunner, and you can read an extract here.

Chair of the judges, Joanna Trollope called the book:

... a perfectly and beautifully written novel. ... a masterpiece ...

and declared Kennedy:

... an extraordinary stylist

Kennedy used her acceptance speech to make a plea for fair treatment for authors and issued a strong pro-literacy message. Her impassioned plea to her audience:

If you genuinely care about reading and books, defend them.

When Kennedy is not writing, she works as a stand-up comedian, and is also an ordained minister*. Find out more about her here.

*Oops. Got this sort of wrong. See Rob's correction in the comments.

Postscript:

Post-win, Kennedy is interviewed by Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian, and Fiona Sampson on the Guardian blog pays tribute.

I've also really enjoyed Ariffa Akbar's piece in the Independent which brings this unique, funny, haunted, complex woman to life. (I am much tickled that her strongest ambition now is to be allowed to write episodes of Dr. Who! I'd like to lobby for that.)

Beware of Ghosts in the Shopping Mall!

It strikes me that several British novels (all by women) seem to be exploring the same territory: Nicola Barker's Darkmans, Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black and now Catherine O'Flynn's What Was Lost are set in post-industrial landscape which is ugly, dehumanised and despairing, and the ghosts of the past are clawing their way through the fabric of time to meddle with the present.

Catherine O' Flynn sets her novel in a Birmingham shopping mall, Green Oaks (actually the main character in the book) while the ghost in question is that of a ten year-old girl, Kate Meany, who went missing (presumed murdered) back in 1980. She appears one night on the CCTV camera of security guard Kurt, while Lisa (deputy manager of Your Music shop) finds a toy stuffed behind the pipes in a service corridor. The novel unfolds as a kind of whodunnit mystery.

The first section of the book takes place in the year Kate, aged 10, disappeared. The story of little Kate playing at detectives with her stuffed monkey Mickey in tow is charming and Kate and her rebellious friend Theresa are the most fully realised and likable characters in the book. If this first section reads like the start of a children's novel, the story soon moves on to more sinister stuff.

I've always felt that shopping malls despite their surface glitz and glamour have a dark underbelly.

Detour - I can't stay long in the big ones without feeling that I'm going to have a panic attack from all the sensory overload (honestly!). I remember being utterly freaked out 1 Utama car park at night hearing Vivaldi's Four Seasons on the loudspeakers echoing through soulless concrete caverns. It was just like the use of hearing Beethoven's 9th in Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange - dismayingly incongruous!

In O'Flynn's novel, Green Oaks (apparently modelled on the Westfield mall) acts as a giant magnet, drawing in the dispossessed and dissatisfied who mooch around the shops all day with nothing better to do and nowhere better to go. O'Flynn is a careful observer, maybe because she herself has worked in retail and been a mystery-shopper and thus experienced of much she writes about, and she is at her best recording the disembodied voices which themselves float, ghost-like, through the mall.

Another detour - I used to work in one of the Birmingham-based shops she mentions in the first section - Midland Educational in their toyshop branch, Barnaby's and there was much in the book that took me back to that time. The utter dead-endness of the job, the petty rivalries between the staff, the sheer exhaustion of having to remain on your feet and be polite to people for hours at a time.

I felt such pain for the poor old man in O'Flynn's book, strung along sadistically for 23 months waiting for his order of a classical cassette that never comes ... because I can remember serving on the most hated counter in the toyshop - the one customers came to for their repairs of Hornby model trains and Scalextric cars. Week after week I'd have to see the same faces, and have to answer the same questions about when their repairs were coming back. And of course politely fob the customers off until the next week. (Oh, I tell you, this book brought back memories!)

Malaysians with their love of shopping malls will definitely be able to relate to the book. It's also an enjoyable, fairly breezy read, although there is such an undercurrent of sadness for what was lost.

And what was lost, in the end? A girl's life, sure, but there are other poignant losses along the way - hope, ambition, self-esteem, a sense of direction.

But perhaps other things are gained. Theresa has Kate to thank for her success in life, and the mystery brings together Kurt and Lisa and shakes them out of their ruts. Above all, the novel ends with a sense of painful things finally being resolved.

The novel is very cleverly and neatly plotted, even if it can be argued (as some readers have) that there is a little too much coincidence at the end. Maybe, in that sense, that makes it a good antidote to Darkmans and Anne Enrights The Gathering where we are left with only loose ends in our hands when we try to conclusively solve the central mystery.

I'm happy for O'Flynn that Tyndall Street Press took a risk on her and look forward to seeing what she does next. The novel, you will recall, was longlisted for the Booker, shortlisted for the Orange Prize and has just won the Costa First Novel Award. Not bad at all!

Here's an interview with O'Flynn bout the book from Brightcove. How nice to hear a Brummy accent again. (I used to have one ...).

Don't Let Rejection Get You Down

I hope it does give people hope. It's very hard to get published and it's hard if you go in there with this burning ambition. I didn't have that, I was protected by my natural pessimism.

Catherine O'Flynn wins this years Costa first novel award for What Was Lost - am account of ghostly goings on in a shopping mall.

(Plan to write about it in a day or two since I've almost finished it ... it's one of the books on my currently-reading pile which has been shoved aside for the you-have-to-read-this- so-you-can write-a-review-or-do an-interview-books. My reading life is complicated! )

Dalya Alberge in the Times reports that O'Flynn weathered rejections from 20 (or is it 14 as the Guardian says ... anyway, an awful lot of) agents before her novel was accepted before it was picked up by Birmingham based small press Tyndall Street Press (whose other publishing success was of course Clare Morrall's Astonishing Splashes of Colour). O'Flynn has worked as a postwoman, in an HMV music store, as a teacher and, briefly, as a mystery shopper.

The judges, which included novelist Joanna Trollope called O'Flynn's novel:

... an extraordinary book ... a formidable novel blending humour and pathos in a cleverly constructed and absorbing mystery.

It also made the Booker longlist last year, you will remember.

The best novel award goes to A.L.Kennedy's Day, a novel which (as again you will remember if you've been paying attention to my blog) made several "best books of 2007 lists". The judges described it as:

... a masterpiece ...

and book makers William Hill announced 2-1 odds on it winning the main prize, to be announced on 22 January.

The winners in the other categories are:

Biography - Simon Sebag Montefiore for Young Stalin
Poetry - Jean Sprackland for Tilt
Children - Ann Kelley for The Bower Bird

The Times includes a disturbing aside about book sales in the UK:

Of 200,000 books sold last year, 190,000 sold fewer than 3,500 copies. More damning still, of 85,933 new books published, as many as 58,325 sold an average of just 18 copies.

Food for thought: the best selling Malaysian titles, in comparison, have done very well indeed.

Further food for thought: if you want to write, don't give up the day job!

Even further food for thought: if at first your manuscript gets rejected, keep on going! (Although you may want to take this advice to heart!)

The Costa website is here but news of the 2008 shortlist is not up yet.

The Costa Reading

It's an all female shortlist for the Costa Book First Novel Award this year with three of the four nominees originally from the Indian subcontinent:

The selected titles are:

A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam
Gifted by Nikita Lalwani
What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn
Mosquito by Roma Tearne

Meanwhile the nominees for the Costa Novel Award are:

Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett
Day by A.L. Kennedy
Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson
The Road Home by Rose Tremain

Note that there's no overlap at all with the Booker list! The best know of these authors is of course Rose Tremain who wrote Music and Silence, but as Charlotte Higgins points out in the Guardian:

... the other novels on the shortlist display a more offbeat aesthetic: AL Kennedy, Neil Bartlett and Rupert Thomson are all respected writers with form, but whose reputations have perhaps bubbled away without necessarily breaking into the top rank of household names. Bartlett is as well known for his career in opera and theatre directing as for his writing; Kennedy also performs as a stand-up comedian.

You can find out more about each of these titles, and also find the nominees for the poetry, non-fiction and children's award on the Costa Awards website. The winner in each category will be announced January 3rd and the overall winner on January 22nd.

Arifa Akbar in the Independent meanwhile highlights the story of Catherine O'Flynn who was turned down by 15 publishers before Birmingham-based independent Tindal Street Press took her on:

O'Flynn, who has also worked as a teacher, web manager and civil servant, said she wrote her novel almost accidentally. Her creative side was awakened by her work at a shopping centre in the West Midlands. "There were many things about it that made me want to write. The trance-like state of the shoppers consuming everything in their wake, the eeriness of the empty centre at night, the constant awareness of surveillance, the differing experiences of staff and shoppers, the industrial past buried beneath it.

"I kept writing about it – almost obsessively, I really wanted to pin down the essence of the place but at that stage there was no plan for this to be a novel.

"Then I heard a story doing the rounds among the centre security guards of a child being seen on one of the CCTV monitors in the middle of the night and that image stayed with me."

She was longlisted for the Orange and Booker Prizes this year, and is also on the shortlist for the Guardian first book award!

Stef Penney's Rattling Good Yarn

Got an e-mail from someone in the publicity department of Simon & Schuster a week or two back asking me if I'd "take another look" at Stef Penney's The Tenderness of Wolves on my blog since the book has just been launched in the US. It quite amazed me that my blog, tapped in on a keyboard in Malaysia, might help to shift some copies on the other side of the world.

Well, the book was sitting on my TBR shelf already, looking forlorn, so what was I to do?

As it turned out, this book was just the read I needed: a rattling good yarn I could slip into my bag and read in odd moments between visiting my student-teachers in schools.

You'll probably remember that the novel won this year's Costa First Novel Award, and although it's set in Canada, the author suffered so badly from agoraphobia that she was unable to travel there and instead did her research in the British Library.

Not that that matters. I remember Kunal Basu at the Ubud Readers' and Writers' festival last year talking about writing his historical novels. It was impossible for him to visit the places where he set his novels because they no longer exist. He saw this in a positive light:

What excites is inaccessibility in real terms, but accessibility in the imagination.

Stef Penney sets her novel in mid C19th Canada and chucks in a whole load of ingredients ... murder, mysterious disappearances, codes to be cracked (one which may hold the secret of an ancient written Native American language and the other a fortune in furs), love stories (gay and straight).

If the story has a weakness it is that I think the author tried to cram in too much, and in parts, especially where the backgrounds of various characters were fleshed out, it seemed terribly rushed. There were an awful lot of threads to bring together by the end of the book, and whilst Penney largely managed this, some parts were left hanging.

I was sad that we did not have a chance to see the protagonist Mrs. Ross (what is her first name??) reunited with her adopted 17 year old son Francis after she finally (and how could she really miss all the clues?) realises that he is gay and that the murdered man was his lover.

And why was she in an asylum in Scotland ... and what does that have to do with the main drift of the story?

And why was there so little about the wolves?

The cast of characters is also very large - and some came alive rather more than others. Francis intrigued me. I liked the warm-hearted but bumbling accountant, Donald Moody, still trying to find his feet with the Hudson Bay Company.

But I loved the huge and ugly half-Mohawk, half-English trapper William Parker, and was so glad that Mrs Ross ended up warming her frostbitten fingers in his armpits ... even if I'd have liked something a lot steamier to melt the frozen Tundra.

Some characters didn't rise very far of the page though, including Knox and his wife and daughters. Others were well drawn but didn't have enough of a role in the book in my opinion, e.g. Jacob and Sturrock.

I also felt that the narration worked best in Mrs. Ross' first person, and got annoyed with the godlike omniscience with which the other chapters were narrated.

But as I say, a very good read which I'd recommend as I think many of you will enjoy it.

And I wouldn't be surprised to see it makes New York Times bestseller list.

Agoraphobia and the Author

Should an author stick to only what they know, choosing to write about only places they have travelled to? Mark Lawson takes up the debate in the Guardian in the wake of Stef Penney's Costa Book of the Year win for The Tenderness of Wolves.

Armando Ianucci, chairman of the judges descibes the book as:

... not just an extraordinary first novel but also an extraordinary novel ... It was a very ambitious undertaking ...

The novel is set in Canada, but the author has never been there - she suffered from agoraphobia and found it incredibly difficult even to take a London Bus to the British Library, let alone jump on an aeroplane. Here she talks about how she managed to overcome the crippling condition and why she shuns publicity.

And you can read an extract from her novel here.

The Award Formerly Known as Whitbread

The Costa Book Awards (formerly the Whitbread Prize) have been announced.

William Boyd has won the Costa Novel Award for Restless, the tale of a wartime spy. It's actually his second Whitbread/Costa win, as his debut novel A Good Man in Africa, won a quarter of a century ago. The Independent reports that:

The judges described the novel as unputdownable. "Restless remains in the mind long after you finish it. Double-cross, double-bluff, all written with effortless clarity."

Boyd being a sensible chap said it was necessary to keep a "properly balanced" view of prizes:

I think they're a good thing because they encourage readers and that's what all writers want. But you have to look on it as the equivalent of a win on the horses or the lottery.

The First Novel Award went to Stef Penney a London-based screenwriter for The Tenderness of Wolves, a murder mystery set in 19th century Canada. Penney was unable to research her novel in Canada as she was suffering from agoraphobia, and unable to fly. So much for the old adage about writing what you know!

The Biography Award went to Keeping Mum: A Wartime Childhood by Brian Thompson. Thopson is a playwright and biographer, and he realised that his own family provided him with an ideal subject, though he says he found the book very difficult to write:

... it took me a very long time to realise that some of the most interesting and frightening and abusive people I'd ever met were my parents. I'd been looking in the wrong place for my stories.

John Haynes, considered an outsider when the shortlist (which included nobel winner Seamus Heaney) was announced, won the Poetry Award for Letter to Patience.

And goodness, the subject of this book length poem strikes a chord with me: it's an imaginery letter written by a man who has returned to Britain from Nigeria, reflecting on how the experience has changed him. The judges described it as:

... a unique long poem of outstanding quality, condensing a lifetime of reflection and experience into a work of transporting momentum, imaginative lucidity, and consummate formal accomplishment.

Veteran writer Linda Newberry took the Children's Book Award for Set in Stone:

... an emotionally charged narrative will thrill all lovers of intelligent fiction ...

the judges said.

The overall prize winner will be announced on 7 February.

Thrilling Shortlist

The Whitbread Prize is now renamed the Costa Prize after the coffee chain that took it over from the brewery, and has announced its first shortlist under that name. Here are the finalists in the fiction category:

William Boyd -Restless
Neil Griffiths - Saving Caravaggio
Mark Haddon - A Spot of Bother
David Mitchell -Black Swan Green

and in the First Novel category:

Michael Cox - The Meaning of Night
Marilyn Heward Mills - Cloth Girl
Stef Penney -The Tenderness of Wolves
James Scudamore -The Amnesia Clinic

(You can read a synopsis of all the shortlisted titles on Costa's website.)

John Ezard notes that the shift in sponsorship seems to have lead to a shift in taste in favour of the thriller:

Two of the four books picked for the novels shortlist released last night for the inaugural £50,000 Costa award are marketed by their publishers as "gripping", "tremendously exciting", "gritty" and "thrilling". ... One of the four books in the first novel category, The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox, is "a story of betrayal and treachery" ending in a "thrilling revelation".

I know that will be just my friend Krishna's cup of coffee.

Another Shot

If you don't win one literary prize, hopefully you get a shot at another! I'm happy for Ian McEwan whose Saturday has won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize after losing out so badly in the Booker stakes.

And while Sarah Walters lost out to Zadie Smith in the Orange stakes, I'm sure we'll be seeing The Night Watch on the list for other awards later in the year. (It will eligible because it was only published this year, unlike the other Orange shortlisted books.) It is that good, believe me. John Ezard in the Guardian reckons it has a "formidable chance" of taking the Booker or the Whitbread.

I'd have hated to be a judge for either the Orange or the Booker with so many strong titles to choose from. And I am still perplexed by Robert McCrum's article on the novel losing its way. I am one happy reader and will let you know if that changes.

Related Posts

His Saturday - My Sunday (4/9/05)
The James Tait Black Shortlist Announced (3/5/06)

Monumental Matisse

I was impressed to see that Walker had a story about the Whitbread Book of the Year up before the media got it! Bloggers are out at the front of the field ...

The £30,000 prize is awarded to the best book overall, from all the other Whitbread categories. I don't envy the judges, having to make comparisons across genre, and apparently last night the voting was the closest in the prize's two-decade history.

In the end, the winner was not odds on favourite Ali Smith for The Accidental, or Tash (whom previously won the first novel award, if you remember), or Kate Thompson's children's book The New Policeman, or poet Christopher Logue's Iliad epic ... but the second volume of Hilary Spurling's biography of the artist Matisse.

Matisse The Master has been described as monumental and ground-breaking and took the author 15 years to write. (An earlier volume about Matisse's early work, The Unknown Matisse, covered his evolution into a painter.) The work has been widely praised and Michael Morpurgo, who chaired the judges, said of it:

So many people felt it was a massive work, but yet it didn't read like it. It read like a story. ... We were reading about this man and his pictures and the life that he had, his family and his travels. Somehow she managed to paint a picture of a painter that was accessible to people not necessarily familiar with art. It was an extraordinary achievement to write a book that length and you get to the end and you're sorry it's finished.

Check out this review of the book from the Sunday Times.

The painting below comes without the usual (for Malaysia) censor's black pen bikini, lest our eyes fall out of our heads for looking at such forbidden fruit! If you want to know more about Matisse's work and see some of his art, go here.

And if you want to read the book ... it's going on my must-buy list for the British Council Library.

Thor's Silk Factory Grouch

Not everyone in the Malaysian litosphere is going gaga over Tash's Whitbread win. Just caught up (mucho belatedly) with Thor Kah Hoong's columns in the Star and he had a cumudgeonly go at The Harmony Silk Factory in last Tuesday's paper . His honesty though, is refreshing.

A FEW months ago, a few people discovered a perverse streak in this writer. They, believing in the opinionated voice that has filled this space for two years, thought I would be able, glibly, to summarise Tash Aw in a couple of sentences.

My reply: Nope, haven’t read it, haven’t thought of picking up a copy.

No immediate curiosity. I feel compelled to turn away when the fuss is heated. Particularly when the Malaysian connection whips up populist froth. Somehow, the occasions always feel tacky like a longest lemang applicant to the Malaysian Book of Records.

Sure, Aw grew up in Malaysia. But he was born in Taiwan. He lives in London. So who’s arbitrating for the claims of Taiwan and Britain?

I am reading Hsu-Ming Teo’s Australian Vogel (year 2000) winning novel Love and Vertigo (Allen & Unwin). Should we stake our claim on her as a Malaysian writer? She was born in Malaysia in 1970, but emigrated to Australia when she was seven. The narrative voice of the novel, Grace Tay, in Singapore for her mother’s funeral, asserts she is Australian. Does it matter?

Perversity has its limits. I did pick up Aw a couple of weeks ago, fortuitously just before the announcement of his winning a Whitbread.

Am I going to give my five sen worth?

No. I’m not going to sound like a sour grouch in the week of his success. My opinion doesn’t matter to him ? and really, good for him. The award will open more doors.

It’s just that I don’t know what the fuss is about because I’ve set aside the book. Another time ? maybe.

Well, okay, since it’s only worth five sen, my response was similar to the time I first read Amy Tan and her Joy Luck Club. I found myself being irritated and eventually skipping bits whenever Tan paused to explain the quaint exoticisms of Chinese culture and home to her primary readers, clueless ang moh.

Even if instruction in cultural oddities had been necessary, I believe it could have been weaved into the narrative more subtly. (Ref: Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior; National Book Critics Circle Award; for an adroit mixing of fact and fiction.)

Her explanations were clumsy and obvious, but excusable because it was her first effort. Her subsequent works have matured in this aspect. Culture has become an integral motive in her narrative, not an exotic gloss to attract tourists curious over chinoiserie.

That was Tan then. Aw’s instruction is even more clunky. In the second chapter, four pages are devoted to a paraphrase of Unwin’s 1954 study Rural Villages of Lowland Malaya.

What’s clunky? This is clunky: “I have paraphrased his words, of course, in order to avoid accusations of plagiarism, but the source is gratefully acknowledged.”

Excuse me. Is this a novel? Reads like one of my students’ essays. (Well, alright, a good student’s essay. Most of my college students would have problems spelling at least four words in that sentence.)

And then when the third chapter, titled The Kinta Valley, began in this fashion: “The Kinta Valley is a narrow strip of land which isn’t really a valley at all. Seventy-five miles long and twenty miles wide at its widest, it runs from Maxwell Hill ? etc,” my will to carry on reading started flagging.

I tried to detect some post-modernist irony beyond my antiquated radar. Maybe those passages were supposed to read like the primary school textbooks we had in the 1950s.

Then there are the details, the lack of. I couldn’t get a whiff of smells, a feel of lives fleshed fully.

Aawww, put my lukewarm snarl down to my senses blocked, clogged in the miasma of my year-end grouch.

Why am I persisting with Hsu-Ming Teo’s novel? I’ll let you know when I’m done with it.

Hadn't heard of Hsu-Ming Teo, but here's some information about her novel.

Tash Takes the Prize!

And there was his colour picture in the Evening Standard a couple of days ago, with the headline:

Writing is the only thing I'm good at says the gardener who has
won an award for his first novel

Gardener!?? The legal career is mentioned a little further down the page (after handyman and decorator!), but of course it's not as exciting: doesn't everyone want to feel famous writers just appear out of nowhere?

Anyway, whooped for joy on the tube and supressed the desire to hug perfect strangers.

After so many long-listings and nominations and near misses, Tash Aw finally won a major literary prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award. And he's still in the running for the ultimate prize, the Whitbread Book of the Year which will be announced 24th January.

Warmest congratulations, Tash.

Whitbread Wonderment

No doubt my friends will be happy to see that Ishiguro has not been included on the Whitbread shortlist. Barnes and Banville didn't make it either. But Rushdie, Nick Hornby, Ali Smith, and Christopher Wilson did.

"Our shortlist may confuse the book trade," the head judge, Philippa Gregory, said.

Or might just go to show that when it comes to fiction,"best" is entirely subjective.

Our Tash is there again - on the shortlist for best first novel, along with his friend and UEA coursemate, Diana Evans. Another first-novel nominee, Rachel Zadock is an amazing literarty cinderella:

(She) was working as a waiter when she had an unusually dire day with the novel she was trying to write. "I gave up and did something I think is death to anyone who works from home, I turned on the TV," she said. On Channel 4 the Richard & Judy show was announcing a "how to get published" contest. "To someone as superstitious as me, that's a sign, so I sent something off." ... Her novel, Gem Squash Tokoloshe, was singled out for discussion. This led to a £20,000 contract with Pan Macmillan, which has enabled her to write full-time. The Whitbread judges were impressed by its "powerful evocation of a child's-eye view of rural South Africa".

It's the kind of break most novice writers can only dream of.