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26 Apr 2013
Weekly Roundup: What does Hilary Mantel have in common with Beyoncé?
It's official, Hilary Mantel is more than just a writer. The serial Man Booker winner has just been named by Time magazine as one of the world's 100 most influential people.
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19 Apr 2013
Weekly Roundup: Prizes, prizes and more prizes
It has been a bewilderingly busy week for anyone who follows literary prizes.
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15 Apr 2013
The Man Booker International Prize and translation
With only five weeks to go until the winner of this year's Man Booker International prize is announced we look at fiction in translation.
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12 Apr 2013
Weekly Roundup: Is the literary world dominated by men and the merits of book prizes
Elizabeth Jane Howard, a Man Booker judge in 1974, has just turned 90 and celebrated by handing in the manuscript for volume five of her lauded Cazalet Chronicles series. She is a formidable woman (as the former wife of Kingsley Amis she'd need to be) but told an interviewer for the Observer that she nevertheless feels the literary world is dominated by men.
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05 Apr 2013
Weekly Roundup: Oscars, Bollinger and forbidden sex
A footnote to the sad death of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala who, as many obituaries have pointed out, held the unique distinction of winning both the Man Booker Prize and an Oscar (two in her case – the same number as Elizabeth Taylor – for her screenplays for A Room with a View and Howard's End).
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04 Apr 2013
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, award winning novelist and screenwriter, dies at 85
Award winning novelist and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has died in at home in New York aged 85.
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28 Mar 2013
Weekly Roundup: Guns, critics, ebooks and English
Novelists are famed for their research but the novelist Aminatta Forna, one of this year's Man Booker International Prize judges, admitted attaining an unlikely new skill as preparation for writing A Hired Man (published by Bloomsbury this week). The book is set in Croatia and has a deer hunter for a narrator so, naturally, Forna had to learn how to fire a rifle.
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22 Mar 2013
Elaine Showalter discusses the work of Chinua Achebe at the Man Booker International prize in Fiction, June 28, 2007
As the designated speaker of a relatively new, wide-ranging, and still evolving literary prize, I’ve paid careful attention to the words of my distinguished predecessors. In June 2005, awarding the first Man Booker International Fiction Prize to Ismail Kadare, John Carey said that he and his fellow judges, called upon to “size up the literary giants and arrange them in order of merit,” had felt like Swift’s presumptuous Lilliputians.
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22 Mar 2013
Weekly Roundup: Sad passing of Chinua Achebe, Roth's 80th birthday and the life of J.M Coetzee
Chinua Achebe, who won the 2007 Man Booker International Prize, died this week aged 82. The Nigerian author was instrumental in opening Western eyes to African literature and was best known for his novel Things Fall Apart which was published in 1958 and has subsequently sold some 12 million copies worldwide and been translated into 50 languages.
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15 Mar 2013
Weekly Roundup: Literary prizes galore
At last, a prize Hilary Mantel hasn't won. Congratulations are due instead to one of her fellow 2012 Man Booker shortlistees, Tan Twan Eng, who has just picked up the $30,000 Man Asian Literary Prize, the region's premier bookish gong.
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