The shortlist for the Orange Broadband prize was released yesterday morning. Here are the finalists:

• Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Fourth Estate)
• Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk (Faber)
• The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai (Hamish Hamilton)
• A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo (Chatto & Windus)
• The Observations by Jane Harris (Faber)
• Digging to America by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus)

Speaking after the announcement, Gray [chair of the judging panel] described the shortlist as “incredibly exciting,” she said. “It represents six beautifully crafted pieces of work that are as accessible as they are fascinating. That this outstanding writing should come from such diverse sources … is doubly thrilling.”

Link to the Guardian article

The shortlist of the Kim Scott Walwyn prize was released today.

The prize was set up to honour the memory of Kim Scott Walwyn, a publishing director at Oxford University Press, who died in 2002 aged just 45, and aims to reward “outstanding achievements by women in publishing”.

This year’s shortlist is made up of Rebecca Carter, who is an editor at large at Random House, Susanna Lob, the head of marketing, reference and online publishing at Oxford University Press, and Annette Thomas, the managing director of Nature Publishing Group.

The winner, who will receive a cheque for £3,000, will be announced on May 10.

Link to the Guardian article

Some excellent short-story-writing advice from recently deceased author Kurt Vonnegut, most of which is applicable to all writing, not just short fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Link (via BoingBoing)

As a preview for the upcoming book How I Write: The Secret Lives Of Authors, the Guardian has released an interesting excerpt in which several authors write about “what gets their creative juices flowing”.  The list includes some unlikely things (including earplugs, chocolate and a squeaky chair) as well as the more usual pictures, music and taking a bath.

Read it here.

The shortlist for the second Man Booker International award was announced yesterday.  15 authors from all over the world are in the running for this prestigious award; some well known (Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan) and some more obscure.

The judges said: “With this list, we offer a gift to readers all over the world, an opportunity to join a conversation on 15 writers, diverse in nationality, language, themes and techniques, but united in their dedication to the power of the word.”

The award, designed “to highlight one writer’s continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage,” is presented to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is available in translation in the English language.

The International Booker prize, unlike the annual Booker prize, is open to English-language authors of any nationality and is awarded for an author’s entire body of work rather than a specific title.  The 60,000-pound prize is awarded every two years.

Link to the Guardian article.  Yahoo News has two articles on the subject: 1 2

The shortlist for the British National Short Story prize has been announced.  The prize, only in its second year, is the world’s richest short story prize, with £15,000 going to the winner, a prize of £3,000 for the runner-up and £500 going to each of the other finalists.
The five finalists are:

• ‘Slog’s Dad’ by David Almond
• ‘The Morena’ by Jonathan Falla
• ‘The Orphan and the Mob’ by Julian Gough
• ‘How to Get Away with Suicide’ by Jackie Kay
• ‘Weddings and Beheadings’ by Hanif Kureishi

The prize exists to raise the profile of the often-neglected short story in Britain.  The chair of the judges, Mark Lawson, said:

“This prize exists partly because many - perhaps even most - publishers and literary editors still regard the novel as the most important form of story-telling and are suspicious of short stories,” he said. “But this year’s selection makes very clear that there is no connection at all between word-count and the scale of subject matter or characterisation that can be achieved.”

Link to the Yahoo News article

Interesting article from Bloggasm, discussing whether releasing a book under a Creative Commons license really does increase sales. Their advice: get BoingBoinged.

“The thing is, there’s a confound here,” Watts explained. “It wasn’t the CC release per se that gave me the boost; it was all the people talking about it. Boingboing doesn’t pimp every novel that comes down the pike. It has to be newsworthy in some way, and an author giving his work away is, for the time being, newsworthy. It attracts attention.”

“So what happens when this catches on?” Watts said. “What happens when everybody releases their work through a Creative Commons licence? Then it’s no longer newsworthy, and while it will certainly continue to make my work more accessible to people who already know of my existence, it certainly won’t lure in any new readers the way the Blindsight campaign has done. It’s a niche strategy, in other words. It only works as long as most artists aren’t doing it– and as long as that’s the case, I’d certainly consider releasing my future books under a CC license.”

Link (via Futurismic)

Previously:
Peter Watts releases SF novel under Creative Commons license

USA Today has a feature on “the most memorable books of the last 25 years”. Number one is (big surprise) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I’m only surprised that The Da Vinci Code isn’t right behind it in second place. Here’s the full top ten list:

1. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
2. The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard (1996)
3. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (2003)
4. The 911 Commission Report by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks (2004)
5. Chicken Soup for the Soul by Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield (1993)
6. Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus by John Gray (1992)
7. Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution by Robert C. Atkins (1992)
8. And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts (1987)
9. Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)
10. The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw (1998)

Link (via The Leaky Cauldron)