Samuel Johnson Prize Longlist Announced

For those of you who prefer to read non-fiction, the Samuel Johnson Prize is a welcome break from the rest of the fiction literary prizes. Subjects cover current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts.
 

The shortlist will be announced at a yet to be announced date in October and the winner on the 4th November.

The eighteen books longlisted are;

  

-         Small Wars, Far Away Places, Michael Burleigh (Pan Macmillan)

·         Empires of the Dead: How One Man's Vision Led to the Creation of WW1's War Graves, David Crane (William        Collins)       

·         Return of a King, William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury)

·         A Sting In The Tale, Dave Goulson (Jonathan Cape)

·         Under Another Sky, Charlotte Higgins (Jonathan Cape)

·         The Memory Palace, Edward Hollis (Portobello Books)           

·         The Pike, Lucy Hughes-Hallett (4^th Estate)           

·         Disraeli, Douglas Hurd & Edward Young (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)    

·         Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, David Kynaston (Bloomsbury)

·         Diana Vreeland: Empress of Fashion, Amanda Mackenzie Stuart (Thames & Hudson)    

·         The War That Ended Peace, Margaret Macmillan (Profile Books)    

·         Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Charles Moore (Allen Lane)         

·         Time's Anvil, Richard Morris (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

·         Edmund Burke: Philosopher, Politician, Prophet, Jesse Norman (William Collins)

·         The Story of the Jews, Simon Schama (The Bodley Head)

·         Far From The Tree, Andrew Solomon (Chatto & Windus)        

·         Everest: The First Ascent, Harriet Tuckey (Rider Books)            

·         Danubia, Simon Winder (Picador)       

Review: Secrecy by Rupert Thomson

Rupert Thomson, the author of this most excellent novel Secrecy has passed completely under my radar. It's always exciting to find an author you like and Thomson's writing is sublime. His bibliography is wide; the author of nine novels. The fourth The Insult was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, his sixth The Book of Revelation was made into a film and Death of a Murderer (2007) was shortlisted for Costa Novel of the Year. His foray into non-fiction with his memoir This Party's Got To Stop won him the Writer's Guild Non-Fiction Book of the Year. So with all that going on how have I missed him!?

His most recent novel, Secrecy, was published in March.
 

Thomson studied Medieval History at Cambridge and he draws on his historical expertise in the telling of this story which is based on the life of the Sicilian wax artist, Gaetano Zumbo. Zumbo is famed for his plague pieces, wooden cabinets containing wax creations of the dead and dying which can still be seen in particular in the scientific museum La Specola in Florence.



Set in Florence, this novel is about Zummo's wax art works but it is primarily about his relationships- with his family, with his patron the Grand Duke, with a young boy who assists him and with his lover. In fact, although Zummo is a very solitary man when he works, his life touches many people and Thomson weaves this mysterious story with his rich and evocative prose. The descriptions are always enough to conjure an image, sometimes exquisite and sometimes painful, but never too much to take away from the tale he is telling, never too much to distract from the character we are following, Zummo, as he finds his place and works to establish relationships to hold him there, only to often have them questioned or pulled out from under his feet often due to his identity as a Sicilian in Florence.

The descriptions of the techniques used to create the wax artworks are fascinating in themselves. But it is the characters that hold the story together so well, maintaining the readers interest right to the close of the story, still uncertain of how it will end. A well written historical novel, alive with the sights and sounds of seventeenth century Italy and the rotten smell of corruption.

Published by Granta.www.grantabooks.com

(Those interested in the background to Thomson's writing of this novel may like to red this very interesting article on the subject http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/758a1fb6-807a-11e2-aed5-00144feabdc0.htmSiracusa#axzz2dqgC1CtA )

Warwick Prize for Writing 2013

Launched in 2008, the Warwick Prize for Writing is awarded every two years and covers all genres and forms. It is worth £25,000 to the winner which will be announced on 24th September.

The shortlist announced on Friday was:

  

 

Good luck to every author shortlisted for the announcement at the end of the month.

Review: The Wild Pupil by Kathy D'Arcy

Recently I had the pleasure of being asked to review a poetry collection for the excellent online literary magazine Burning Bush 2. The magazine publishes work by contemporary poets and authors and is edited by Alan Jude Moore, himself an author of three collections of poetry. The magazine can be read at http://burningbush2.com/ and the published review is below.

Review: The Wild Pupil  by Kathy D’Arcy (Bradshaw Books)

The Wild Pupil is the second collection of poetry by Kathy D’Arcy, a talented poet from Cork who originally trained as a doctor. She uses this background in her work, in both a technical and literary way. The title of the work is both enigmatic and Yeatsian alluding to the scholar, rebellion and youth. It is also the title of one of the poems in the collection, one that gets right to the centre of the living body “as your thorax springs open/ like an eye,/ your heart/ the wild pupil.”    

The collection of over fifty poems has several themes to it. The reader will come across the subjects of family, the sensual and the physical aspects of the body, ageing and death and also animals. Many touch on aspects of life that may make us feel uncomfortable in their bluntness and reference to the more unpleasant side of illness, or just the body in general, but they reinforce the power of the word. In fact, the sparseness of D’Arcy’s language, maybe a hangover from her technical training, adds to the edginess of the poetry.  

The opening poem ‘First Furniture’ talks of “the trail of hair I leave/ on every surface…” referring uncertainly to ageing or maybe the hair loss of cancer and is referred to again in ‘Christmas’.  Other poems reference an ageing mother, as a daughter attempts to clear away long-kept and forgotten childhood books or even the sharing out of crockery after a death in ‘Good China’.  

However, throughout the collection, it is the keen paring back of language to the bare requirements to put across the message, even to the extent that many carry a mysterious uncertainty of meaning, is the feeling that is left with the reader after exploring this collection. This feeling of uncertainty means that poems can be revisited over again to reveal maybe more or maybe to stay hidden, just holding back enough on their meaning to have something deliciously ‘not-quite-there’ that draws you back to see if there is any reveal since the last visit. This is the real appeal of D’Arcy’s poetry.

The Wild Pupil by Kathy D’Arcy is published by Bradshaw Books.

Published at  http://burningbush2.com/reviews-essays/louise-ward-5/