Signs of Change in Book World?

What could be nicer than books and chocolate? The Galaxy Book Awards are rapidly upstaging the Booker prize, which has taken a knock lately after arguments about the need for readability which supposedly clashes with perceptions of literary value  (are the two things irreconcilable?).

Alan Hollinghurst won the Author of the Year award - after having been left off the Booker shortlist - for his novel 'The Stranger's Child'.   A lot of people will be pleased to see an award going to Sarah Winman's debut novel  'When God was a Rabbit',  and an old-fashioned literary biography won the non-fiction prize ahead of the much hyped celebrity bios.

Apparently there's been a reader's revolt against the trend towards (often publisher generated) celebrity memoirs/biogs  and Claire Tomalin's 'Dickens' is doing much better than anyone (even Claire herself) predicted.  Hurray!!!!

Nothing for poets this time though.

Interesting post by Elizabeth Baines over at Fiction Bitch, about the experience of re-reading books you loved as a child.    It's called 'What do we read, when we read?'

Galaxy Award Results:- 

Waterstone's UK Author of the Year: The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst (Picador)


Specsavers popular fiction book of the year: A Tiny Bit Marvellous by Dawn French (Penguin)

More4 popular non-fiction book of the year: How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran (Ebury Press)

Crime and thriller of the year (available on iBookstore): Before I Go to Sleep by S J Watson (Doubleday)

Daily Telegraph biography of the year: Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin (Viking)

International author of the year: A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Corsair)

Food and drink book of the year: The Good Cook by Simon Hopkinson (BBC Books)

WHSmith paperback of the year: Room by Emma Donoghue (Picador)

National Book Tokens children's book of the year: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness (Walker Books)

Audible.co.uk audiobook of the year: My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young, read by Dan Stevens (HarperAudio)

Galaxy new writer of the year: When God was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman (Headline Review)

Christina Rossetti re-issued

Today I'm posting over on the Authors Electric blog site, about the re-issue of my Christina Rossetti biography as an E-book.

We have a huge storm here at the moment - just watching it from the sitting room.  We've spent two days at Peralta trying to pick as many olives as we could before the storm arrived - four of us picked 243 kilos!  Now have very bad back, but at least the olives are at the press.  Genoa, sadly, is afloat with a flash flood generated by this storm.  Italy does seem to be suffering from severe weather this year - meteorological as well as economic.

Amazon Link 

  

Fright Night - my Halloween date!

For Halloween we went to a fund raising event at the Croce Verde (Green Cross).   In Italy a lot of the emergency services (eg Misericordia ambulances) are run by charities, rather than government run as in the UK.  The Croce Verde has been much involved with the rescue effort in Monterosso and Vernazza, so particularly in need of support at the moment.  We paid 15 euros for a gigantic portion of meat and chips, with wine, followed by a very sticky cake - estimated at about 1000 calories per slice!   It was fancy dress, though not everyone managed it.  Neil rather stole the show with a home made mask downloaded from the internet and a borrowed wig.

Here is my Pri-mate for the evening;

Today and tomorrow are public holidays here - All Saints Day and All Souls Day.  Everyone visits the cemetery to tidy graves and place flowers and remember the absent members of their families.  In even older times it was Samhain, when people believed that the fabric of the universe was at its thinnest and the spirits of the dead could communicate with the living.


So, in Italian fashion,  I've been remembering absent members of my own family - my Italian grandfather Thomas, my lively grandmother Annie who loved to party, my story-telling Irish father and long suffering Geordie mother (I still miss them a lot) and two little grandsons, Alfie and Taliesin who died at birth, but are still very much part of our family.

Tuesday Poem: Halloween with Emily Dickinson

It's Halloween in Italy - a Festa they celebrate well, since it coincides with All Souls Day, when everyone visits the family graves and places flowers on them and remembers the dead.  In South America tomorrow is called the Day of the Dead.

Looking around for a suitable poem, I thought of Emily Dickinson's 'One Need not be a Chamber to be Haunted' and then found this strange video of the poem.  Emily Dickinson's portrait has been animated so that it seems as if the poet herself is reading the words.




I love the poem because it works on so many levels - not least because it talks about the 'haunting'  of the creative imagination. We all function on 2 levels - the conscious and the unconscious.  The unconscious is the basement - we take the lift down, it’s a bit dark and murky - most definitely haunted -  and most people don’t want to linger there for long, but if you want to create - that’s where you have to be.  Margaret Atwood in her essays about writing 'Negotiating with the Dead', says that the act of writing is the business of going down into the underworld and making ‘something or someone’ that is dead alive again. 






For more Tuesday Poems please go to the Tuesday Poem Hub and check out individual poets' contributions on the sidebar.

Italy's Storm of the Century

Just back to Italy, arriving at midnight to discover that the storm that wiped out one village in the Cinque Terre and buried another, had removed the pathway to our house and deposited it somewhere in the olive grove. We are left with a rutted river bed strewn with rubble. The storm had also tripped our electricity so that the fridge and freezer were full of rotten food - not a good surprise when you open the front door!

But it could have been worse - we can see the Cinque Terre from our terrace and it’s only a few kilometres as the crow flies. Apparently the rain was biblical, making it impossible to drive or walk anywhere for a few hours. 20 inches of rain fell in that time.   Roads turned into rivers and the water brought down rocks, trees, rubble and mud. There are mini landslides all the way up to our village, but nothing major. Different in the Cinque Terre - which is a World Heritage site. The pictures are horrific. In Vernazza rubble and mud have been deposited up to first floor level - filling houses and shops and railway tunnels. In Monterosso, parts of the town were washed completely away.

Rescuing people from 1st floor windows.

This used to be a shop.

Our road and the contents of the freezer fade into insignificance when you look at these pics.  And it's such a delight to be back in Italy - the sun shining, still with some warmth. Our landlords are beginning to pick the olives, though this year apparently they’re small and dry and hardly worth the effort. Too little rain during the summer months. The storm we’ve just had has also stripped the trees of many of the olives that were there. Not much left for oil.  Don't try being a global warming sceptic in the bars round here!!

Filming Rossetti

Just off to London to make a short film for the BBC on Christina Rossetti.  They want to feature her Christmas carol 'In the bleak midwinter' and the film will go out just before Christmas as part of the magazine programme 'The One Show'.  Apparently I'm to wander around the streets of London (and the Tate Gallery) discussing Christina with a celebrity!  I'm sure it will be great fun, but very nervous at the moment.  Being camera shy I don't feel comfortable in front of a TV camera.

The really nice thing is that the phone call about the programme came just as we were re-formatting my Rossetti biography  'Learning Not to be First', for Kindle - hopefully it will give it some publicity - a brilliant piece of luck!

Christina was one of the most fascinating people at the centre of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and her poetry knocked spots off the poetry of her brother Dante Gabriel.  Apparently she was very good at art too, but girls didn't get any training in those days.  It makes you very glad to be a woman born in the 20th century.

Tuesday Poem: Autumn Haiku

One of Tomas Transtromer's last poetry collections, published in 2004,  is called 'The Great Enigma'.  The largest part of the collection is a long series of haiku.  This is one of them;

The darkening leaves
in autumn are as precious
as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And I liked this one - though it's rather sombre.

Death stoops over me.
I'm a problem in chess.  He
has the solution.

At the moment I'm enjoying his 'New Collected Poems' published by Bloodaxe and translated by Robin Fulton.

For more Tuesday poems, please visit the hub at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com