Category Archives: Awards

Yahoo News writes:

The Swedish Academy said on Friday it will announce the 2007 Nobel Laureate in Literature on October 11, with odds-makers tipping well-tried names to take a prize that often goes to the obscure or controversial.

Bookmaker Ladbrokes, which takes bets on the literary world’s most prestigious award, has Italian novelist and essayist Claudio Magris as its favorite, followed by Australian “bush” poet Les Murray and American novelist Philip Roth.

Swedish poet Thomas Transtromer lies fourth on the list with Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis in fifth.

Barring Murray, all have been suggested as possible winners in years past.

The short list for the 10 million Swedish crown ($1.54 million) prize is closely guarded and the winner is often a surprise — sometimes obscure enough to send reporters and literary scholars scurrying to reference books or the Internet.

The winner will be announced at 1 p.m. Stockholm time (1100 GMT) on October 11, the Swedish Academy said on its Web site.

While all other Nobel Prize dates are known well in advance, the date of what is deemed the literary world’s top honor is never revealed until a week before the announcement.

A military blogger formerly stationed in Iraq won the “Blooker” prize for his book and former blog My War: Killing Time in Iraq, just as US military authorities are cracking down on blogging from the front.

Colby Buzzell was awarded the £5,000 Lulu Blooker prize for My War: Killing Time in Iraq, which was voted the best book of the year based on a blog. It triumphed over 110 entries from 15 countries.

The memoir was drawn from a blog he kept while in Mosul, in northern Iraq, in 2004, in which he portrayed the texture of daily life there, from listening to Metallica on his iPod to watching his fellow “grunts” surf the web for pornography.

The paradox of Buzzell’s victory is that it quickly follows the revelation that the Pentagon has introduced new rules restricting blogs among soldiers, fuelling speculation that live and unadorned combat writing from the field such as Buzzell’s may be the last of its kind.

Matthew Burden, a former major in the US army who runs the most popular milblog, Blackfive, with 3 million unique users a year, said he had been contacted by several serving soldiers who said they were going to stop posting. “They are all putting their hands in the air and saying, ‘That’s it, I’ve had enough.’”

He said the rules were self-defeating and would deter blogs such as acutepolitics@blogspot.com, which is written by a specialist who defuses roadside bombs. “Take that down and you are removing one of the most positive messages for what the army is doing in Iraq,” Mr Burden said.

Link to the Guardian article

From The Independent:

A family saga blending the hedonistic world of Second World War Cairo with the harsh realities of a mixed-religion relationship in modern-day Egypt has been named the Romantic Novel of the Year.

Rosie Thomas’s Iris & Ruby – her 19th novel – was described by the chair of the judges’ panel as a "stomach-wrenching" read at the awards ceremony at London’s Savoy Hotel, organised by the Romantic Novelists’ Association.

Read the rest here.