Miles Franklin longlist
Eight of the 10 nominees for this year's Miles Franklin award are female authors. Australia's notable literary award includes three debut novelists, a poet and a wrapper. Celebrating "Australian voices in many forms", the award was established in 1957 to laud novels of literary merit featuring representations of Australian life. Among the contenders for the 2015 award are the 87-year-old Sydney author Elizabeth Harrower for her fourth novel In Certain Circles, published almost four decades after her last book. The winner of the award, worth $60,000, will be announced on June 23rd. The author Evie Wyld won the 2014 prize for her novel All the Birds, Singing. Wyld will appear at the Cúirt Festival in Galway later this month with the American author Jenny Offill.
The 10 finalists:
Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles
Sonya Hartnett, Golden Boys
Sofie Laguna, The Eye of the Sheep
Joan London, The Golden Age
Suzanne McCourt, The Lost Child
Omar Musa, Here Come the Dogs
Favel Parrett, When The Night Comes
Christine Piper, After Darkness
Craig Sherborne, Tree Palace
Inga Simpson, Nest
Wodehouse comic fiction shortlist
Joseph O'Neill and Irvine Welsh are among the six authors nominated for a comic fiction prize that includes a bottle of Bollinger and a Gloucestershire Old Spot pig as part of the award. The 2015 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize, named after the British comic writer PG Wodehouse, also sees three debut novelists, Nina Stibbe, Helen Lederer and journalist Caitlin Moran, and a second Scottish author, Alexander McCall, in contention for the award. The winner will be announced on May 21st in one of the opening events for this year's Hay Festival.
The shortlisted novels:
· The Dog, Joseph O'Neill's tale of a New York lawyer living in solitude among Dubai’s super-rich
· Man at the Helm, Nina Stibbe's comic debut about a divorced mother who moves her three young children to rural Leicestershire in the seventies
· Fatty O'Leary's Dinner Party, Alexander McCall Smith's book about a married couple who travel to Ireland for a birthday celebration
· How to Build a Girl, Caitlin Moran's bildungsroman about a teenage girl growing up in nineties Wolverhampton
· Losing It, Helen Lederer's debut about a divorced TV personality fronting a campaign for a new diet pill
· A Decent Ride, Irvine Welsh's 10th novel, which revisits characters from his 2001 novel Glue
Gutter Bookshop launches
A number of launches are taking place this month at the Gutter Bookshop in Temple Bar. This year's Hennessy First Fiction winner, Henrietta McKervey, launches her debut novel What Becomes of Us on Thursday, April 2nd from 6.30pm. Senator Ivana Bacik will give the introduction on the night. The novel tells the Cumann na mBan story of 1916 from the perspective of a journalist working in sixties Ireland. To Hell or Monto is the intriguing sounding title of Maurice Curtis's new book, which launches on Wednesday, April 8th from 6.30pm. The book explores a time when the two most notorious red-light districts in Europe could be found on the streets of Dublin. Musician Gar Cox will launch his aptly titled EP, Support Your Local Bookshop, from 6.30pm on Friday, April 10th, with a launch in Gutter Dalkey on the same evening for Rachael Weiss's memoir The Things About Prague.
Robin Robertson at UCC
The spring literary series continues at University College Cork with a reading by the Scottish poet Robin Robertson on Thursday, April 9th. Robertson has published five collections of poetry and is a noted interpreter of the work of Swedish Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer. Two of his volumes, A Painted Field (1997) and Swithering (2006), have won the Forward Prize. Hill of Doors (2013) was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award. In 2004, he received the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was jointly award the Petrarch Prize in 2013. Robertson's selected poems, Sailing the Forest, has just been published. The poet is also a publishing editor at Jonathan Cape and has edited the work of many writers, including John Banville, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Sharon Olds, JM Coetzee and Anne Enright. The event takes place at 6pm in the Learning Zone, UCC Library. Admission is free and all are welcome.
Catholic Literary Festival
Novelists David Lodge and Andrew O'Hagan, and the award-winning historian Lady Antonia Fraser, will be among the speakers debating faith, fiction and truth at the inaugural UK Catholic Literary Festival in June. Taking place on June 19th and 20th, the event has been organised to mark the 175th anniversary of the UK's weekly Catholic journal, The Tablet. Lodge and co will be joined at the Library of Birmingham by other high-profile speakers, Catholic and non-Catholic, from the literary, theological and historical worlds. Speakers such as Alison McLeod, Michele Forbes and Roy Foster will explore the influence of the Catholic imagination on literature, the arts and their own writings. Tickets and the full line-up are available online at http://www.birmingham-box.co.uk/season/tablet-175-festival.
Little Black Classics
A good week for UK publisher Penguin, with a new report charting impressive sales figures for its Little Black Classics series. Nielsen Bookscan's data for the week ending March 21st shows that Penguin has sold 281,818 Little Black Classics in the month since publication. The 80 titles, costing 80p each, were published for Penguin's 80th anniversary on February 26th. The Communist Manifesto is the top seller, featuring in the Sunday Times bestseller list. As of this week, the one millionth copy in the overall series has been dispatched. The new website has received over 150,000 hits since launching, with 40 million impressions on the hashtags #Penguin80 and #LittleBlackClassics. Tesco will be stocking certain titles from this week.
Contact sarah.gilmartin@gmail.com with your literary listings
