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.

Murder Most 'Orrid

This year's Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction has been won by In The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale, which takes for its subject a notorious 1860 murder case in which Saville Kent, a three year old child from a respectable middle-class family disappeared from his bed. His body was later found stuffed down the privy (outside toilet).

As Charlotte Higgins explains in the Guardian :

The Road Hill House murder provoked national hysteria, and inspired writers such as Charles Dickens and that great exponent of the Victorian sensation novel, Wilkie Collins.

Chair of Judges, Rosie Boycott described the book as:

... one of those great non-fiction books that uses the techniques of fiction to magnificent effect. On first reading, it is an absolute page-turner. Then, when you reread it, you realise how many levels it has, how much it tells you - about the founding of the police, the Victorian study of physiognomy, the inherent snobbery of the time that meant that the police wouldn't touch anyone from the upper classes, because they 'couldn't' have committed a crime. ... And then there's the way the case became a media event, in a very McCann-like way. The newspapers of the time started spinning stories of who might have done it.

There's a really whizzy website for the book, complete with interactive map of the house where the murders took place. And you can read an appetite-whetting extract here.

There was a very strong shortlist for this year's prize and the other books that were nominated are :

Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher
Crow Country by Mark Cocker
The Whisperers by Orlando Figes
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French
The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross