Monday 28 May 2012

Prize Updates

Several literary prizes have announced their shortlists in the last couple of weeks, and books which I have featured previously have been doing well.

The Desmond Elliot Prize has only been running since 2007, but has quickly established its importance as an award for the best first novel written in English and published in the UK. The shortlist of three novels includes The Land of Decoration (Grace McCleen) and The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Rachel Joyce), as well as The Last Hundred Days (Patrick McGuiness) which featured on the longlist for last year’s Booker Prize.

The James Tait Black Prizes are, in contrast, the UK’s oldest literary awards, and are made by the University of Edinburgh. This year’s fiction prize includes Snowdrops (AD Miller), There But For The (Ali Smith) and Solace (Belinda McKeon), as well as You and I (Padgett Powell).

Meanwhile, Orange announced that this will be the last year of their sponsorship of the Orange Prize (for female writers in English). I have been collecting and reading the shortlisted books since the inauguration of the prize seventeen years ago. Good luck to Anne Enright with The Forgotten Waltz – I will update on the winner later in the week.

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