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  • To the Beeb

    Posted Friday March 27th 2009
    by James Smith

    The 2009 BBC National Short Story Award was launched at Broadcasting House last night.

    An intimate but enthusiastic group of guests listened to chair of judges Tom Sutcliffe speak eloquently about the short story. No stranger to fiction as presenter of Radio 4's Saturday Review arts programme, he nevertheless admitted to being a relative stranger to the form, but (as he writes in today's Independent) he is 'looking forward to spending time with a form that has to write its way to solidity and substance, and can never achieve it by sheer dogged pagination'.

    That's nicely put. Tom will be joined on the judging panel by authors Dame Margaret Drabble and Helen Dunmore, BBC Radio 4's Editor Di Speirs, and singer-songwriter Will Young. The latter's appointment caused a mini hoo-haa on the Guardian's website, but there's nothing to say that Will won't (will won't?) be as keen as Tom and the other judges to get stuck into a mountain of 8,000-word (max.) mini-masterpieces.

    Find out more about the Award

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  • Chinese publishers in London

    Posted Wednesday March 18th 2009
    by James Smith

    To Porter's Restaurant in Covent Garden, London, as a guest of the British Council.

    A delegation of Chinese publishers from Beijing and Shanghai is in Britain for a week to find out about how the UK publishing industry works and how books are promoted. The British Council has organised a packed week of meetings for them in London and Edinburgh with booksellers, publishers and other organisations that promote books and reading (eg Booktrust).

    It took some time for us to establish exactly what Booktrust is and does – 'are you a publisher?' (me: 'no, but we do publish booklets that recommend books'); 'are you a PR company?' ('nooo, but we do promote books and reading'); 'so you're a market research organisation ...' ('well, no, but we do conduct research ...'); 'oh, so you're a government organisation' ('sort of, but ...').

    We got there in the end, but all this explaining made me think two things: 1) the diverse nature of Booktrust's work can make for some pretty lengthy introductory conversations, and 2) the diverse nature of Booktrust's work is quite extraordinary.

    Thankfully after this I was able to talk about how we are promoting translated fiction in the UK and…

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