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Independent Foreign Fiction Prize panel at Free the Word!
Posted Tuesday April 27th 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaLast weekend, in the streaming sun, the summery vibes were all over the south bank with ice creams, bicycles, outdoor eating, drinking and merriment. Four floors up in Royal Festival Hall, in the Weston Pavillion with a gorgeous view over the London Eye and Houses of Parliament, we sat in on the Independent Foreign Fiction prize panel.
Chaired by Gary McKeone, it featured Daniel Hahn, one of this year’s judges and a seasoned translator in his own right; Maureen Freely, most known for her work with Booker-winner Orhan Pamuk; and Anne Mcclane standing in for Juan Gabriel Vásquez, who was a victim of volcanic ash. It was a breezy affair in a hot room.
As part of International Pen’s Free the Word! Festival, it took place alongside more high profile events like conversations with Richard Ford and webcasts with Chinua Achebe, but this, for me, felt like the highlight. So much of the translated fiction over the days of the festival highlighted the beauty of the words and the celebration of other cultures, but this panel placed the focus on the ones who seemingly have the hardest work: the translators.
To highlight this, Daniel Hahn told a particularly poignant and…
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The Winter House... a new kind of short story
Posted Friday April 23rd 2010
by Nikesh Shukla'The Winter House' is a new short story film and website that has been designed by Naomi Alderman who won the Orange Prize for New Writers in 2006 for her novel Disobedience.
'The Winter House' is aimed at helping young people identify with the short story form. The story, which plays on the website like an animated film and includes game-like interactive elements, is nonetheless a single narrative with a third-person narrator – the central character Millie, whose father has been murdered.
'The Winter House' hopes to encourage young adults to read stories online, by making them interesting and visual, so that being on a computer is an encouragement to reading, rather than as opposing it.
It’s also a useful teaching aid in subjects such as History, Citizenship, English and Media Studies, and there are some educational links on the site to help with this.
This story was commissioned by Booktrust and supported by Arts Council England, as part of the Story campaign.
The short story is based on the oldest and most enduring form of narrative in the world – that of the human desire to tell a story. The Story campaign is interested in… -
Self-Publishing in a Digital Age
Posted Thursday April 22nd 2010
by Anna Lewis
A guest-blog from Completely Novel's Anna Lewis discusses self-publishing in a digital ageThinking of self-publishing?
You’ve sent work out to agents and publishers and you’re yet to receive a positive response. With many literary agents receiving around six thousand manuscripts a year, you could be in for a long wait. Or, you could be one of the increasing number of people to take your book’s fate into your own hands and make the work available yourself.
Old-fashioned vanity publishing
Typically, vanity publishing involves paying large sums of money to a publisher for them to publish your work, rather than the traditional relationship of the publisher paying you. In the past, this was pretty much the only way that you could see your work in print without getting a traditional publishing contract if you didn’t have the time or the technical skills to prepare a manuscript and get it to a printing company. The biggest downside was that even after forking out loads of cash, it was still up to you to promote your book and sell the hundred or so copies that you had piled up to the ceiling,…
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Authors we love... Bernadette Mayer
Posted Monday April 19th 2010
by Anna MckerrowI first discovered Bernadette Mayer, one of the founders of Language Poetry, when I was studying for my MA a couple of years ago. We had started looking at poets using a 'processual' approach in their work, like Tina Darragh and Susan Howe – that is, poets creating work by setting themselves rules and processes to produce work with which would enable them to extract unexpected meaning from language, and treating language itself as material which holds, at best, only uncertainty and chaos.
It is, by the way, utterly topical at this moment to be writing about the Language Poets, considering that Rae Armantrout has just won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her ninth volume, Versed, for which she has also received the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. Although she is (apparently) considered one of the most lyrical of the Language poets, her work still “embodies large questions and apprehensions in the conjunctions of individual words, and generates productive clashes from arrangements of small groups of phrases.”
Mayer’s poetry also likes to clash words up against each other as the result of anarchic processes, and much of her work is varied in form because…
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Authors we love... by Niven Govinden
Posted Wednesday April 14th 2010
by Niven GovindenIn our ongoing series, acclaimed author of Graffiti My Soul and We Are the New Romantics, Niven Govinden, discussed his love for John Cheever.
John Cheever’s always been my boy; something about him and the spirit of his work have long informed my writing life. The ‘Chekov of the suburbs’ tag is an oft-used one, and mostly uttered in cliché, but coming from the suburbs myself, I always saw the truth in this label. In his novels, short stories and non-fiction, Cheever always wrestled with a sense of place, (along with sexuality and class), where city freedoms vied for prominence over stultifying commuter life.
By day, and especially during cocktail hour, New York provided the breathing space and the answers that the manicured new towns of Connecticut couldn’t. He wrote of characters, choked with responsibilities, whose exhale moment came in downtown bars buying drinks for office girls. Only, back in the suburbs, late at night, the streets silent, neighbours, wife and children sleeping, looking out onto the gardens, watching the moonlight catching on the cold water pool, and washing away guilt with a series of nightcaps, there was a sense of peace and satisfaction. That this really was…
