Category: publishing

The rookie novelist who captured the €100,000 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award this week isn’t even a native English speaker, yet his prose won over the judges of one of the world’s most prestigious prizes. “The unsolicited manuscript, written in Mr. Hage’s third language… was famously plucked out of a slush pile at Toronto-based publisher House of Anansi Press.”

“The book itself is the focus of my interest – the ambling or swift-paced development of a story over the number of pages the author has decided it will take. Reviews of book don’t interest me, in the same way that simply reading the plot of a novel on Wikipedia doesn’t, and Pierre Bayard’s advice on bluffing literature doesn’t either.”

“Montreal writer Rawi Hage has won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his debut novel De Niro’s Game… The topicality of this year’s prize may be judged from the fact that three of the eight short-listed novels dealt with the Middle East, two of them being concerned directly with the Israeli Arabs.”

When a bestselling author becomes a bestselling brand, does the quality of his/her work inevitably suffer as a result? “Publishers are asking ever more of their writers to get on to the bestseller lists, [and] as genre readers, we’re unfortunately complicit in this.”

“Many Americans are completely unaware of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, even though it hands out more money than any other annual fiction prize in the world. Tomorrow’s winner will get 100,000 Euros, or roughly $157,000.”

“An 800-word hand-written story by bestselling author J.K. Rowling, which she describes as a prequel to the Harry Potter boy wizard books, sold for 25,000 pounds ($49,000) at a charity auction on Tuesday.”

“With a projected investment of £4m, up from £2.87m last year, the programmes administered by Booktrust will deliver some 2m books to children aged 4-5, and 11-12.”

“Could Amazon.com’s seven-month-old wireless e-book reader – a rectangular wonder in antique iPod white, able to download any of 125,000 books adapted to its format – be the tipping point that marks the decline and fall of the paper book?”

“But hopes that the 10-year tenure, whose previous incumbents have included Ted Hughes and John Betjeman, could go to a woman look set to be dashed. Almost none of the leading female poets are interested in the position.”

“Marketing books has always been a tough business, but these days authors are joining forces with the publicity machine and working everything from fashion layouts to product endorsements to keep their amazon.com rank at the top.”