Literary events

Finding the ‘Lost Booker’

So it seems that due to a procedural anomaly, a whole year’s worth of novels missed out on being considered for the Booker Prize. This is being remedied by a retroactive award, with a shortlist of novels from 1970 being…
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Reading 8 or 9 hours a day

George Lamming also said something quite amazing in his speech, and I forgot to mention it in my last post. He mentioned that he reads for 8 or 9 hours a day, and has done throughout his life. If he…
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British “state of the nation” novels

One of my fellow Legend Press authors, Mark Piggott, wrote an interesting article in the Independent about ‘state of the nation’ novels. I thought it would be complaining that nobody’s writing about contemporary British issues these days – there’s been…
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J.D. Salinger and phonies

The other day, I picked up a copy of The Times because of the news of J.D. Salinger’s death on the cover. I read about Catcher in the Rye and its skewering of “phonies”, and how Salinger retreated to his…
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Congratulations, Ruth Dugdall!

Last year I won the Luke Bitmead Writer’s Bursary, an event that changed my life and led to the publication of On the Holloway Road. This year it is the turn of Ruth Dugdall with her novel The Woman Before…
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Media hoaxes and churnalism

Greg Watts just linked to an interesting article in the Financial Times about the recent spate of media hoaxes, like a boy supposedly trapped in a balloon and a fake US Chamber of Commerce press conference on climate change, and…
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American vs. British readers

Some interesting analysis of US and UK reading habits, courtesy of the summer edition of The Author magazine: American readers prefer romance; British ones prefer literary fiction Men make 35% of book purchases in the US; 42% in the UK…
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And the winner is…

After much reading and re-reading and writing of lists, I awarded the London Fringe Short Fiction Award to Alex Burger for his story London: Through a Glass Darkly. The theme of the contest was ‘London: Glamour and Grime’, and I…
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London, Glamour and Grime

I’ve been asked to judge a short story contest run by the London Bridge Festival. Entry is free, word limit is 1,000 words and the theme is “London, Glamour and Grime”. More details and entry requirements available here.
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