Obama Gets a Nibbie

There's lots of book award news needs blogging, but perhaps the best headline was the one in The Bookseller : Obama Takes Home a Nibbie.

Yes, Mr. President won one of Britain's 2009 Galaxy British Book Awards ("The Nibbies") which highlight more popular titles. Dreams from My Father was awarded the Tesco Biography of the Year. Kate Summerscale who won two seperate awards (Galaxy Book of the Year and Play.com Popular Non-Fiction Award) for The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.

Aravind Adiga who seems to be showing up on every fiction award going, won the Borders Author of the Year for The White Tiger. Tom Rob Smith was named Waterstones' New Writer of the Year for Child 44 and Richard and Judy's Best Read of the Year was Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News.

The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson was awarded the Books Direct Crime Thriller of the Year, while Sebastian Faulks won the Sainsbury's Book of the Year Award for his Bond novel Devil May Care, and Stehenie Meyer took the W.H. Smith Children's Book of the Year award for Breaking Dawn.

Michael Palin was awarded an outstanding achievement award which I think he thoroughly deserves. As TV presenters Richard and Judy said at the ceremony, he is a :

... modern day Renaissance man – a successful actor, comedian, playwright, diarist, documentary maker, charity founder, explorer and, of course, author.

Writing Women

There's much good author stuff in the book pages of the British press this weekend, and I particularly enjoyed these two interviews.

Kate Atkinson (author of Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Human Croquet, Emotionally Weird and Case Histories) is interviewed in the Times, Tim Teeman in the Times is determined to discover her "deep dark secrets" and she equally determined not to give them up.

Atkinson was an academic who changed direction when her PhD viva was refused. In retrospect now she sees that failure as a blessing

Atkinson says she doesn't regret leaving academia. “If I had got my doctorate I wouldn't have become a writer. Had I continued I would probably be studying something like passivity and activity in the language of Jane Austen. In fact, in my next book (What Would Jane Do?) that's what the heroine will be studying - I am living vicariously through her. If you have something in you that's creative and you're not creating and not aware what you should do to create, then that's my deep dark secret.” Well we got there in the end. “It was one of the major things in my early life - not getting outside what was inside.”

Crime writer Ruth Rendall is interviewed in the Telegraph by Laura Hynd. She's 78 - can you believe it looking at Nigel Farndale's portrait (right)? Maybe there's something about writing that keeps you young? Ah no. She runs on the treadmill every day to keep her size 10 figure.

And she reads voraciously - her favourites among mine too (we seem to have a shared love for unreliable narrators!):

The greatest novel she has ever read is Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, though the one she wishes she had written is Zoë Heller's Notes on a Scandal.

Her latest novel is The Birthday Present and is the 13th published under her pseudonym Barbara Vine. Another Ruth Rendell novel is due out in November. Rendell is currently campaigning against female genital mutilation.