The story of a murder case that gripped Victorian England won Britain’s richest nonfiction book prize Tuesday.
Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Or the Murder at Road Hill House beat five other titles for the $60,000 Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction.
Summerscale’s best-selling book tells the story of an 1860 child murder that tested the mettle of one of Scotland Yard’s first detectives and inspired writers including Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Named in honor of the 18th-century critic and lexicographer, the Samuel Johnson Prize is open to English-language books in the areas of current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts.
The other finalists were The World Is What It Is, Patrick French’s often unflattering biography of writer V.S. Naipaul; Mark Cocker’s bird book, Crow Country; Orlando Figes’ chronicle of Stalin’s Russia, The Whisperers; Blood River, Tim Butcher’s account of retracing the steps of Victorian explorer H.M. Stanley; and New Yorker music critic Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century.
Last year’s winner was Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City, about life in Baghdad’s Green Zone.
Congratulations to Chicago mystery novelist Marcus Sakey, who has won the 2007 Strand Magazine Critics Award for best first novel for The Blade Itself. Laura Lippman won the best novel award for What the Dead Know. The winners were announced at an invitation only cocktail party in Manhattan, by bestselling author Jonathan Santlofer.
"This was such a great group of nominees, it must have been difficult to choose the winner," said Frank Simon, Associate Publisher of The Strand. "Laura and Marcus were worthy winners, in the past few years Laura has produced a fantastic body of work and Marcus is a new talent who I have no doubt in the future will be nominated for the best mystery novel award."
Marcus Sakey set his debut novel, The Blade
Itself, in Chicago, the city he calls home. (John H. White~Sun-Times)
The Blade Itself, which has been optioned by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's production company, is about childhood friends who take different paths after they partner in a pawnshop robbery that ends up going horribly wrong.
Sakey spoke to the Sun-Times last year about the book's connection to Chicago:
"The book couldn't be set anywhere else," he said. "Chicago is really a character and something of a crucible, too. It's a beautiful city with tons of opportunity, but at the same time it's a city of tremendous divisions. South Side vs. North Side and white collar vs. blue collar and opportunity vs. lack of hope. I really wanted to make that into the frenetic backdrop of the novel."
Sakey has since been quite productive. His latest novel, At the City's Edge (St. Martin's Minotaur) came out in January, and another new one, Good People (Dutton), comes out next month.
Lippman a former journalist for The Baltimore Sun, has won several other top crime fiction prizes, including the Edgar, the Anthony, the Shamus, and the Barry. Her latest novel, Another Thing to Fall, was released in March by William Morrow.
DUBLIN, Ireland — Beirut-born writer Rawi Hage won one of the world’s most lucrative literary prizes Thursday for his debut novel De Niro’s Game, about two childhood friends who take different paths to survive amid civil war in the Lebanese capital.
Five judges from Ireland, Britain, Spain and the United States selected Hage for the $155,000 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work beat 136 other books from 45 countries, all works published in English in 2006. All the books had been nominated by libraries worldwide.
Hage, 44, fled war-torn Beirut in the early 1980s, studied at the New York Institute of Photography and settled in 1991 in Montreal, where he has built a career as a photographer and essayist.
Author Rawi Hage
The judges praised De Niro’s Game as ‘‘an eloquent, forthright and at times beautifully written first novel. Ringing with insight and authenticity, the novel shows how war can envelop lives.’’
Hage received the prize in a ceremony at Dublin City Hall and declared himself ‘‘a fortunate man.’’
‘‘After a long journey of war, displacement and separation, I feel that I am one of the few wanderers who is privileged enough to have been rewarded, and for that I am very grateful,’’ he said.
Hage said he sought to follow a tradition of authors ‘‘who have chosen the painful and costly portrayal of truth over tribal self-righteousness.’’
The other finalists were The Attack, by Yasmina Khadra; Let It Be Morning, by Sayed Kashua; The Woman Who Waited, by Andrei Makine; The Sweet & Simple Kind, by Yasmine Gooneratne; Dreams of Speaking, by Gail Jones; The Speed of Light, by Javier Cercas, and Winterwood, by Patrick McCabe — the lone Irish finalist.
The prize is run by Dublin’s public library system and financed by a Connecticut-based management consultancy called Improved Management Productivity and Control. IMPAC has its European headquarters in Dublin.
The very first entry on this blog featured a book titled American Band: Music, Dreams, and Coming of Age in the Heartland (Gotham Books, $26) — a book that appealed to the former Midwestern band geek in me.
Good news! The book's author, Kristen Laine, recently was awarded the L.L. Winship/PEN New England award for nonfiction. The award is given annually to books written by New England authors and/or books on New England topics. While the book is all about Midwestern teenagers, Laine lives in New Hampshire, which allowed her to qualify for the prize. (For a list of all the winners, check out the PEN New England Web site).
Author Kristen Laine
Last year's Winship winner in the nonfiction category was Sebastian Junger for A Death in Belmont.
To learn more about American Band and read more reviews, visit Laine's Web site. The paperback comes out in September.
Chicago-based author Jon Lellenberg, along with his co-authors Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley, was recently nominated by the Mystery Writers of America for a 2008 Edgar Award in the Best Critical/Biographical category for Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters (Penguin Press, $37.95)
Publisher's Weekly had this to say: "This fascinating collection of previously unpublished letters from the creator of Sherlock Holmes offers a revealing glimpse of a Renaissance man fated to be overshadowed by his most famous character. Beginning with correspondence from Doyle as an eight-year-old in 1867, the editors offer a warts-and-all picture of his life until 1920, 10 years before his death, covering the author's frank accounts of life at a boarding school, his struggles as a young doctor and aspiring writer, and his political advocacy. This will be essential reading for all fans of Conan Doyle and his sleuth."
The Edgar Awards —named after Edgar Allan Poe, of course — "are considered the Oscars of the mystery genre." The award ceremony will take place May 1 in New York. For more information: www.theedgars.com.
NEW YORK (AP) — A novel about a young girl’s affinity for Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and an exploration of life in and near the water in the South Pacific are this year’s winners of the 12th annual Kiriyama Prize.
The award is given for ‘‘literature that contributes to greater understanding of and among the peoples and nations of the Pacific Rim and South Asia.’’
New Zealand author Lloyd Jones was honored in fiction for Mister Pip, in which a student on a war-torn South Pacific island escapes in her mind to Dickens’ 19th century London. The nonfiction prize went to Julia Whitty’s The Fragile Edge, a report on people who live by the water in the South Pacific and a celebration of the water itself.
Jones and Whitty each will receive $30,000.
The Kiriyama is sponsored by the nonprofit Pacific Rim Voices. Previous winners include Michael Ondaatje and Rohinton Mistry.
I can't tell you how thrilled I was to learn that there's an award out there for the Oddest Book Title. Who knew? I did not, but it kind of goes along with my Book of the Day idea that whatever catches my eye might get featured on this blog.
The 2007 Diagram Prize for the oddest title of the year goes to: If you Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start WIth Your Legs.
"The winner makes redundant an entire genre of self-help tomes,’’ said Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller, a British magazine. ‘‘So effective is the title that you don’t even need to read the book itself.’’
The author, Big Boom (no kidding, that's the author) calls it a ‘‘self-help book, written by a man for the benefit of women.’’ It’s a book, he writes, that is ‘‘raw, honest and about you,’’ distilling ‘‘the sweat off my back, the wrinkles in my forehead from anger and thinking all the time.’’
Second and third place, respectively, went to I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen and Cheese Problems Solved. (I might mention here that neither these titles nor the winning title came through my Book Room. If they had, they most certainly would have warranted their own blog entries.)
Past winners include: Weeds in a Changing World (1999), The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories (2003); Bombproof Your Horse (2004); and The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification (2006).
NEW YORK (AP) — Kate Christensen’s The Great Man, a novel about a celebrated painter and the three essential women in his life, has won the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation announced Wednesday.
Kate Christensen
Christensen, author of three previous novels, will receive $15,000. The four other finalists, each of whom will receive $5,000, are: Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees, David Leavitt’s The Indian Clerk, T.M. McNally’s The Gateway and Ron Rash’s Chemistry and Other Stories.
Previous winners of the award, established in 1980, include Philip Roth, E.L. Doctorow and Don DeLillo.
The PEN/Faulkner Foundation, based in Washington, D.C., is a nonprofit organization ‘‘committed to building audiences for exceptional literature and bringing writers together with their readers.’’
NEW YORK — Stories from the island of Hispaniola were winners Thursday night at the National Book Critics Circle awards: Dominican-American Junot Diaz took the fiction prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Edwidge Danticat of Haiti was cited in autobiography for Brother, I’m Dying.
The general nonfiction prize went to Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid, while the winner in biography was Tim Jeal’s Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer. The poetry award went to Mary Jo Bang for Elegy, and the criticism winner was Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise.
Winning authors (from left): Tim Jeal, Mary Jo Bang, Alex Ross, Edwidge
Danticat , Emilie Buchwald, Sam Anderson, and Harriet Washington.
Not pictured is Junot Diaz. (Seth Wenig~AP)
Diaz, whose novel tells of a young, obese Dominican immigrant and his tragicomic quest for love, was on his way to Venezuela on Thursday night for personal reasons and his award was accepted by Sean McDonald of Riverhead Books. He joked that ‘‘some distinct shouting’’ could probably be heard all the way from Caracas, or at least the muffled sounds of ‘‘the vestigial part of his brain being blown.’’
Danticat — known for such fiction as The Dew Breaker and Krik? Krak! — said she was a bit out of place in nonfiction, telling her fellow finalists that ‘‘I feel like I’m visiting your category’’ and promising ‘‘to speak well of this world’’ when she got back to writing fiction.
Jeal spoke of the many years working on his book about the famed explorer Henry Stanley, a process he described as ‘‘mammoth’’ and ‘‘irksome.’’
Bang offered a more personal memory. She recalled a sixth-grade play in which she was to portray the season of spring and ‘‘slink across the stage in diaphanous scarves.’’ The play was canceled after a parent protested, thinking Bang would only be wearing scarves. So, on Thursday, she thanked the critics for ‘‘restoring my moment on stage.’’
Two honorary awards also were presented. Literary critic Sam Anderson of New York magazine received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and Emilie Buchwald, co-founder of the Milkweed Editions publishing house, won the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award.
The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, has about 500 members. There were no cash prizes.
