Thousands of book lovers will be heading to Oxford next month for the city’s annual literary festival.
Highlights this year will include an appearance by Oxford author Philip Pullman, who will be talking about how his prize-winning book Northern Lights has been turned into a film starring Nicole Kidman.
And visitors are promised an early glimpse of Lyra and the main characters in the eagerly awaited film, The Golden Compass.
Click here to read the full article.
The New York Times posted a story on this a few days ago, but Times Online has their own article now:
An award-winning children’s book about a ten-year-old girl seeking answers about life has provoked an uproar in America because it uses the word “scrotum†on the first page.
[…]
The Higher Power of Lucky won the Newbery Medal, considered the Pulitzer of children’s literature, last month and has gone into a second print run of 100,000.
Artist Trust
Grants for Artist Projects
Grants of up to $1,500 each are given annually to Washington State poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers to support the development of new work. Submit up to eight pages of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction by February 23. There is no entry fee.
Link to the website for complete guidelines.
Stadler Center for Poetry
Philip Roth Residence in Creative Writing
A four-month residency, including a $4,000 stipend, at the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University is given annually to a poet, fiction writer, or creative nonfiction writer. The 2007 Philip Roth Residence is open to U.S. prose writers over the age of 21 and not enrolled in a college or university. Submit up to 20 pages of prose, a curriculum vitae, and three letters of recommendation by February 24.
Link to the website for complete guidelines.
Blurbs from the Poets & Writers, Inc. contest calendar.
Oort-Cloud is a new writing site that lets readers and writers be part of a “social publishing” experiment. It uses web 2.0-style features, such as tag clouds, rss feeds and post rating that makes it easy to keep track of a favorite author and find other good writers.
…authors create and distribute their work, and readers, individually and collectively, including fans as well as editors and peers, review, comment, rank, and tag, everything.
For writers, Oort-Cloud offers….
A place to share experiences in writing, publishing and help one another in dealing with the challenging decisions associated with copyright.
A place to reach out to readers, develop stronger ties to them, find new ones, and keep them up-to-date about new and coming works.
A place to learn what ideas and issues readers are interested in.
A place to help readers understand the issues concerning writers, especially in light of intellectual property issues.
A place to share opinions about trends in science-fiction and encounter new ideas that might inspire new creativity.
Oort-Cloud is geared mainly toward science fiction and fantasy writers, but genre definitions are flexible: “there’s nothing to say your science-fiction or fantasy contribution could not also be, in part, a romance, mystery, horror story, or even a western.”
Link (via BoingBoing)
Another book has found its place on ban lists around the country on the basis of protecting the delicate constitutions of American children.
The word “scrotum†does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children’s literature, for that matter.
Yet there it is on the first page of “The Higher Power of Lucky,†by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature. The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.
“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,†the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.â€
The rest of the article can be read here, and the definition of ridiculous can be found here.
In the article, Amis asserts that there is little glam in the world of writing.
“Well, it is a sort of sedentary, carpet slippers, self-inspecting, nose-picking, arse-scratching kind of job, just you in your study and there is absolutely no way round that. So, anyone who is in it for worldly gains and razzmatazz I don’t think will get very far at all.”
He also addresses Manchester University’s decision to put him in the role of professor of creative writing.
“I may be acerbic in how I write but I’m not how I live. And I would find it very difficult to say cruel things to people in such a vulnerable position. I imagine I’ll be surprisingly sweet and gentle with them. One of the things I’ve learned about fiction - you really do lay yourself open in a way that no other so-called creative artist does. Most other art you’re just exhibiting a particular talent, even poetry up to a point, but by writing fiction you expose not only your talent but your whole being, your social, sexual and psychological being and you’re never more vulnerable than when you do that, and I’m well aware of that fact and will take it into account.”
The full article can be found at The Guardian.
Patricia Schroeder, the president of the Association of American Publishers, said US publishers in China last year suffered an estimated 52 million dollars in losses due to piracy on the Internet.
“Visits to China and discussions with our member publishers reveal a staggering amount of book piracy plaguing this most promising of markets,” she said.
Book piracy also includes illegal commercial scale photocopying of academic materials, print piracy and unauthorized translations as well as trademark counterfeiting, Schroeder said.
Bestsellers such as the Harry Potter series, Dan Brown’s novels and political autobiographies are pirated in English and Chinese within days of their home country releases, Schroeder said.
Link to the Yahoo! News article
There’s a twist in the exercise. (which I’ve used in Ode to a Postbox). And it’s this.
The most common object in the modern world is potentially the most sacred because its restoration to sanctity is totally unexpected. The poet has traditionally helped to keep the sacred alive by associating the world’s great symbols - a tree, the ocean, the sky - with simple feelings of compassion, humanity, love, non-violence, noble resonance. Big ideas have most often been expressed in straightforward language (naturally I mean the direct intensity of Shakespeare, not the gibberish of a lawyer or a government). But as oceans, trees and skies die in front of us, and the world and all its strange wonders are desanctified, our exercise is to seek out the overfamiliar and disregarded, the rejected, marginalized and faceless even, and to load these obscure players in life with larger significance. Here is a work of unification and of ‘invisible legislation’, to paraphrase Shelley.
Email your entries, with ‘Poetry workshop’ in the title field, to books.editor@guardianunlimited.co.uk by midnight on Sunday February 25. The shortlisted poems, and Aidan’s responses, will appear on the site soon afterwards.
Link to the Guardian article
