And the Shortlist for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year is....

#TheakstonsCrime #AwardShortlist

 

The shortlist for crime writing’s most wanted accolade, the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, has been announced....

 

Click on the images below on further content from each author!

 

 

 

 

Executive Director of T&R Theakston Ltd and Judge, Simon Theakston, said: “It’s a remarkable shortlist that shows the crime genre shapes our cultural landscape and dominates publishing.” All shortlisted titles will be promoted in WHSmith stores nationwide from 2 June - 20 July. The winner will receive a £3,000 cash prize, as well as a handmade, engraved oak beer cask made by Theakston Old Peculier. The overall winner will be decided by a panel of Judges, alongside the public vote. The public vote opens on 1 July and closes 15 July at www.theakstons.co.uk. The award ceremony will be hosted by broadcaster Mark Lawson on 21 July on the opening night of the 14th Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate.

Migrant voices in creative writing surge at Massey

Voxy - Monday, 30 May, 2016

The new Massey University Press, led by respected publisher Nicola Legat, will have creative writing on its upcoming list, including the next edition of Poetry New Zealand, edited by poet and senior lecturer Dr Jack Ross for the past three years.

International writers who now call the Manawatu home are adding a distinctive vibe to Massey University’s burgeoning creative writing scene.

A surge in activity and success among Massey University staff and student creative writers - from New Zealand, as well as the United States, Britain, Latin America and Australia - reflects the growing strength and profile of its undergraduate and postgraduate creative writing programmes, says Palmerston North-based author and creative writing senior lecturer Dr Thom Conroy.

Ex-pat writers offer a fresh take on New Zealand identity from the migrant’s experience, says Dr Conroy, a dual American-New Zealand citizen who moved here from Ohio 11 years ago.

A case in point, Dr Conroy is about to launch his second novel, titled The Salted Air, two years after the success of his debut novel The Naturalist - set mainly in New Zealand and based on the true story of 19th century German naturalist, botanist and explorer Dr Ernst Dieffenbach. It topped the Neilsen Weekly Bestseller list in New Zealand after its release in 2014 and was at one point selling ahead of Man Booker winner, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. His next novel has a contemporary New Zealand setting, and will be launched in Palmerston North on June 3.

Colleagues, as well as current and former students from the School of English and Media Studies, have been gaining a profile in both publishing and arts performance across genres in fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, and theatre and film writing.

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Awards news with Alice Lewinsky at Text Publishing

The Australian Book Industry Awards have named Magda Szubanski’s Reckoning the Biography of the Year and outright Book of the Year for 2016. Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child won the Reader’s Choice Award for International Book of the Year. The ABIAs recognise publishers’ work in editing, design, production, marketing, publicity and sales, as well as author achievement. Stephen Daisley was named winner of New Zealand’s richest writing prize, the inaugural Acorn Foundation Literary Award, for his novel Coming Rain, at the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. The NSW Premier’s Literary Awards have honoured two Text authors: Sonia Dechian’s An Astronaut’s Life won the 2016 UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing and Magda Szubanski’s Reckoning won the 2016 Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction.  The 2016 CBCA Shortlist was recently announced, with a number of Text titles among the shortlistees. Vikki Wakefield’s Inbetween Days was shortlisted in the Older Readers category; Martine Murray’s Molly and Pim and the Millions of Stars was shortlisted for the Younger Readers prize; and We Are the Rebels by Clare Wright was shortlisted for the Eva Pownall Award for Information Books. Magda Szubanski’s Reckoning was also recently awarded the 2016 Nielsen BookData Booksellers Choice Award. The prize celebrates the titles that booksellers most enjoyed recommending to their customers in 2015. Senior Editor Penny Hueston has been awarded a UK PEN Translates award for her translation of Sarah Cohen-Scali’s Max. Books are selected on the basis of outstanding literary quality, strength and innovation of the publishing project, and contribution to literary diversity in the UK. Hueston translated the work from its original French to English. Max is published by Walker Books in the UK. Overseas, Lori Roy won the Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best Novel for Let Me Die in His Footsteps. Presented by the Mystery Writers of America, the Edgar Allan Poe Awards honour the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television.

A ‘Surprise Book’ And A Switch In Narrative Styles For Author (And Bookstore Owner) Louise Erdrich

WORDS Posted: May 29, 2016

“I think we’re at a really interesting place in literature. And probably in our cultural life, too. So we’ve had maybe thirty or forty years of reliable birth control in this country, right? And that has changed everything.”

 

Read the story at The Rumpus Published: 05.29.16

Should it be legal to resell e-books ?

With e-book reselling heading to the EU Court of Justice, we examine the complexities of the law.

by David Meyer - May 26, 2016  - arstechnica UK

  

One of the most interesting questions in the world of modern entertainment may soon be pondered at Europe's top court: can people resell the e-books that they buy?

This question is vital in the digital era, and relevant not just to the world of book publishing, but also the realms of music, film, and games. You're able to resell the CDs and DVDs that you buy, so why can't you do the same with downloaded copies of albums and movies?

The case involves a Dutch second-hand e-book platform called Tom Kabinet, which took a previous ruling by the European Court of Justice, involving second-hand software, as the go-ahead for its own business model. Since 2014, Tom Kabinet has been at war with the Dutch Publishers Association (NUV), which sees it as a threat to the entire book industry.
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The all-conquering Wikipedia?

Duke Humfrey’s Library, the Bodleian, Oxford

                                                         © Oxford Picture Library/Alamy
                                                                                                                                                                              

PETER THONEMANN - TLS

Jack Lynch

YOU COULD LOOK IT UP

The reference shelf from ancient Babylon to Wikipedia
464pp. Bloomsbury. £25 (US $30).

978 0 8027 7752 2

 

In the Lower Reading Room of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, there is an entire bookshelf – quite a big bookshelf – filled with concordances to Classical Greek and Latin authors. When I was an undergraduate, I worked at the desk next to it most days. The books are still there, in more or less the same place they always were: the four fat sober grey volumes of A Concordance to Livy; Isabella Gualandri’s Index nominum prop­riorum quae in scholiis Tzetzianis ad Lycophronem laudantur; A Lexicon to Herodotus, compiled by none other than the young Enoch Powell.

 

It is little short of a miracle that the concordances, lists of all the words appearing in a given text, have so long survived the librarians’ regular purges of the open shelves stock in the Lower Reading Room. Frankly, the entire C.Index shelfmark could be hauled off and shredded and no one would be any worse off. All 400 lb of them are utterly obsolete, obsolete as few books in history have ever been obsolete. Even out-of-date telephone directories retain some historical interest. Print concordances have no intrinsic interest at all: they are simply bad paper search engines designed for a world which had not yet invented good online search engines. These massive reference works, the products of years of human drudgery, have been entirely superseded by two or three online databases of Greek and Latin literature. If I want to find all instances of the word haimasiē, “low fencing-wall”, in Herodotus, I can do so online in a matter of seconds, thanks to the digital Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (eight hits).
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The Rise Of Pirate Libraries

WORDS Posted: May 30, 2016

“The creators of these repositories are a small group who try to keep a low profile, since distributing copyrighted material in this way is illegal. Many of them are academics. The largest pirate libraries have come from Russia’s cultural orbit, but the documents they collect are used by people around the world, in countries both wealthy and poor.”

 

Read the story at Slate Published: 05.24.16

When Life Is Truly Terrible, Writing Dystopias Might Not Feel So Fictional

artsjournal  - May 30, 2016

“Five years after the popular uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere, a bleak, apocalyptic strain of post-revolutionary literature has taken root in the region.”

 

Read the story at The New York Times Published: 05.29.16

An Evening with Fiona Susman

A Legendary Jazz Musician with a Penchant for Nice Shoes

Off the Shelf By Bob Bender    |   Monday, May 30, 2016 In the mid-1980s my new assistant came to Simon & Schuster from a law firm in Atlanta that specialized in entertainment law. Together, we went over the firm’s list of clients and agreed that one we most wanted to sign up for Simon & Schuster was Miles Davis. I had long been a fan of Miles’s music. As it turned out, Miles was ready to tell his story. Before long we had his autobiography under contract, pending a meeting in person. READ MORE

Fair play: can literary festivals pay their way?

With authors demanding payment and overheads tight, organisers are under increasing pressure. What does the future look like?

Illustration by Alex Green at Folio

Alex Clark - The Guardian , 28 May 2016

 

I think the truth hit last summer, when I was at a festival to interview a group of writers. It was not a literary festival per se, but a combination of music, theatre, comedy and debates, in among which there stood a doughty literature tent, made rustic by the odd hay bale. What one noticed most, though, was the food: an endless vista of eating opportunities, from crepes to dirty burgers to artisanal pizzas to anything but a cheese sandwich.

Mistakenly, given my temperament and my knees, I had opted to camp, albeit in a motor vehicle rather than under canvas. Making my way through the site to literature HQ, I heard a couple of young guys catching sight of a chum. “Hey!” they chirped. “Sweet tent, man! Where’d you get it?” “Harrods,” came the reply.

I will fast-forward you through the rest of the day: the novelists and poets I interviewed were all terrific, and played to a lusty crowd, if smaller than that for the “Gin tasting while playing a ukulele” workshop. Native American headdress count: high. Cost to spend a weekend here: higher. Most surreal moment: spotting John Lanchester wandering through the guy ropes. Departure of your literary correspondent: as soon as possible. Highlight (apart from the writers, of course): the moment when my long-suffering pal and I, having escaped, spotted a municipal leisure centre and flung ourselves sweatily into its pool. That night we pulled up in the chocolate box village of Bourton-on-the-Water, got drunk in a pub and slept in the local car park. Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty we were not.  MORE

                    

 

A dark tale that navigates the underbelly of urban New Zealand.

A dark tale that navigates the underbelly of urban New Zealand. It is also a very human story of hope and possibility. Expect to hear a lot more about this book, I expect it to gain a lot of attention. I couldn't put it down
       

On the night that Carla Reid plans on celebrating her wedding anniversary with her husband Kevin and their grown son Jack, their New Zealand farmstead has never felt more like home. But when Ben Toroa and another aspiring gang member brutally force their way into the house with robbery and more on their minds the night and the rest of both their lives take a radically different direction. As Carla struggles to come to terms with the aftermath and bereavement of different kinds, and Ben faces the consequences in prison, their stories continue to interweave.   

                          

About the author

Growing up in a publisher's home in South Africa, Fiona fell in love with language and the written word at an early age. This was during the apartheid era, and witnessing the brutal regime at work sensitised Fiona to the issues of injustice and racial prejudice. This is her second novel following Shifting Colours.
Fiona now lives in rural Auckland, New Zealand with her husband and family..
           

                   

ISBN: 9780749020262

Allison & Busby- NZ $32.99

2016 EMERGING POETS COMPETITION - ENTRY NOW OPEN

ENTRY NOW OPEN
 The Divine Muses Poetry Reading & Unity Books Auckland
 

2016 EMERGING POETS COMPETITION

 

Judge - poet and teacher VANA MANASIADIS

 

Results announced at Divine Muses Poetry Reading on National Poetry Day, 26th August 2016

 

First Prize: $200 in Unity Book’s book tokens Second Prize: $100 in Unity Book’s book tokens

 

Closing Date: 1st  August 2016

 

The competition is open only to writers considered ‘emerging’

i.e. have not published one or more books (fiction, poetry, nonfiction) with a New Zealand or overseas publisher,

and

is a current or former undergraduate (BA, Hons, BSc, BComm etc) or Masters student attending The University of Auckland, Auckland University of Technology,

Manukau Institute of Technology and Massey University (Albany Campus, Auckland only)

 

 

 

 

 

FOR DETAILS GO TO

 

http://www.artagent.co.nz/poetry/poetry.htm

Weekly News from Literary Hub

From Literary Hub:

·         On Don DeLillo’s later fiction, which is “rich, chewy and best consumed in small mouthfuls.” | The Guardian

·         Sarah Nicole Prickett and Gary Indiana discuss LA’s more glamorous secrets, people who read Atlas Shrugged when they’re twelve, and sexy serial killers. | Bookforum

·         Yellow is the new black: On the rise of “brighter, bolder” book covers, for which Amazon may be (is probably) to blame. | Wall Street Journal

·         “[W]here Ulysses swells with linguistic inventiveness and gleeful experimentation, Portrait swells with … well, what? Mood.” Karl Ove Knausgaard recalls first reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in honor of its 100th anniversary. | The New York Times

·         “I knew what it was like to encounter the miniature and wish to have it for yourself.” Kaitlyn Greenidge on diminutive tacos, dollhouses, and desiring the unattainable. | Lenny Letter

·         “I scanned them really quickly and thought, Holy shit, these are good.” On the discovery of 3 complete short stories by Raymond Carver 10 years after his death. | Esquire Classics

·         In honor of Short Story Month, stories by Alexandra Kleeman, Lauren Groff, Garth Greenwell, and 14 others. | Huffington Post

·         Tony Tulathimutte on the “nine-month war of attrition to secure the original title of [his] book.”| The Paris Review

·         “Parenthood is not the enemy of anything; it’s the condition without which none of us would exist.” Rumaan Alam on being a writer and a father. | BuzzFeed

Santiago Lyon is the last in a series of profiles of photojournalists, who bear witness to war and catastrophe on our behalf. | The Globe & Mail

More at Literary Hub

The New York Times Best Sellers

The New York Times Best Sellers - June 5, 2016

           

Combined Print & E-Book Fiction

1. 

   16 weeks on the list

   ME BEFORE YOU

   by Jojo Moyes

   A woman who has barely been beyond her English village finds herself while caring for a wealthy, embittered quadriplegic.

   Read Review
2. 

   3 weeks on the list

   15TH AFFAIR

   by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro

   When a brutal murder threatens the domestic happiness of the San Francisco police detective Lindsay Boxer, she turns for help to the Women’s Murder Club.
3. 

   New this week

   THE WEEKENDERS

   by Mary Kay Andrews

   On the North Carolina island of Belle Isle, a woman investigates her husband’s shady financial affairs after his mysterious death.
4. 

   5 weeks on the list

   THE LAST MILE

   by David Baldacci

   In a sequel to “Memory Man,” Amos Decker, a detective with an extraordinary memory, investigates the case of a convicted killer who wins a last-minute reprieve.
5. 

   New this week

   THE FIREMAN

   by Joe Hill

   During an epidemic that causes people to spontaneously combust, an infected New Hampshire nurse fights to stay alive, aided by a mysterious figure known as the Fireman.

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