Sheila Heti makes Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist

Toronto-based author Sheila Heti has made the longlist for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction for her 2010 novel, How Should a Person Be? (House of Anansi Press). Formerly known as the Orange Prize, the annual award celebrates “excellence, originality, and accessibility in women’s writing.”

Judged by Miranda Richardson, Jojo Moyes, Natasha Walter, Rachel Johnson, and Razia Iqbal, the winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction will receive a cheque for £30,000 and a limited-edition bronze figurine known as a “Bessie.”

Orange, the U.K. phone company, pulled its sponsorship in May. According to the Women’s Prize website, this year’s award is being “privately funded” in the form of “gifts from companies and individual donors.”

The finalists will be announced April 16 at the London Book Fair, and the winner revealed June 5. A new sponsor will be announced at the awards ceremony.

The rest of the longlist:

• Kitty Aldridge, A Trick I Learned From Dead Men (Jonathan Cape)
• Kate Atkinson, Life After Life (Doubleday U.K.)
• Ros Barber, The Marlowe Papers (Sceptre/Hodder & Stoughton)
• Shani Boianjiu, The People of Forever are Not Afraid (Bond Street Books)
• Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (Crown)
• A.M. Homes, May We Be Forgiven (Viking Canada)
• Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior (HarperCollins)
• Deborah Copaken Kogan, The Red Book (Hyperion Books)
• Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (HarperCollins)
• Bonnie Nadzam, Lamb (Other Press)
• Emily Perkins, The Forrests (Bond Street Books)
• Michèle Roberts, Ignorance (Bloomsbury)
• Francesca Segal, The Innocents (HarperCollins)
• Maria Semple, Where’d You Go, Bernadette (Back Bay Books)
• Elif Shafak, Honour (Viking)
• Zadie Smith, NW (Hamish Hamilton)
• M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans (Scribner)
• Carrie Tiffany, Mateship with Birds (Picador)
• G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen (McClelland & Stewart)

Esi Edugyan makes Orange Prize shortlist

Esi Edugyan has made the Orange Prize for Fiction shortlist. The award celebrates “excellence, originality, and accessibility in women’s writing.”

Edugyan’s novel Half-Blood Blues (Thomas Allen Publishers) will compete against Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz, Georgina Harding’s Painter of Silence, Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign Bodies, and Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder for the £30,000 prize, to be presented on May 30.

Half-Blood Blues, which won the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize, is also shortlisted for the B.C. Book Prize, which will be announced on April 19, and the U.K.’s Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, which will be awarded on June 16.

Esi Edugyan, JJ Lee, Charlotte Gill nominated for B.C. Book Prizes

The West Coast Book Prize Society has announced the shortlists for the 28th annual B.C. Book Prizes, and for Esi Edugyan, the competition cuts close to home.

Edugyan, whose novel Half-Blood Blues won the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize and this morning was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, is competing against her husband, Steven Price, and his novel, Into That Darkness, for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Both books are published by Thomas Allen Publishers.

Charles Taylor Prize for Non-fiction shortlisted authors Charlotte Gill and JJ Lee face off again, this time for the Hubert Evans Non-fiction Prize, alongside 2012 Canada Reads finalist Carmen Aguirre. Gill is also nominated for the Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award.

The winners in all seven categories will be announced at the Lieutenant Governor’s B.C. Book Prizes Gala on May 12 in Vancouver.

Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize:

• Michael Christie, The Beggar’s Garden (HarperCollins Canada)
• Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues (Thomas Allen Publishers)
• Frances Greenslade, Shelter (Random House Canada)
• Steven Price, Into That Darkness (Thomas Allen)
• D.W. Wilson, Once You Break a Knuckle (Hamish Hamilton Canada)

Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize:

• Chuck Davis, The Chuck Davis History of Metropolitan Vancouver (Harbour Publishing)
• Fred Herzog, Fred Herzog: Photographs (Douglas & McIntyre)
• Andrew Nikiforuk, Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America’s Great Forests (Greystone Books)
• Sheryl Salloum, The Life and Art of Mildred Valley Thornton (Mother Tongue Publishing)
• Scott Watson, Thrown: British Columbia’s Apprentices of Bernard Leach and Their Contemporaries (Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery)

Hubert Evans Non-fiction Prize:

• Carmen Aguirre, Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter (Douglas & McIntyre)
• Gary Geddes, Drink the Bitter Root: A Writer’s Search for Justice and Redemption in Africa (Douglas & McIntyre)
• Charlotte Gill, Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-planting Tribe (Greystone Books)
• Theresa Kishkan, Mnemonic: A Book of Trees (Goose Lane Editions)
• JJ Lee, The Measure of a Man: The Story of a Father, a Son, and a Suit (M&S)

Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize:

• Patrick Lane, The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane (Harbour)
• Susan McCaslin, Demeter Goes Skydiving (University of Alberta Press)
• Garry Thomas Morse, Discovery Passages (Talonbooks)
• John Pass, crawlspace (Harbour)
• Sharon Thesen, Oyama Pink Shale (House of Anansi Press)

Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Prize:

• Dan Bar-el and Rae Maté, Pussycat, Pussycat, Where Have You Been? (Simply Read Books)
• Nicola I. Campbell and Kim La Fave, Grandpa’s Girls (Groundwood Books)
• Mike Deas, Dalen & Gole: Scandal in Port Angus (Orca Book Publishers)
• Robert Heidbreder and Marc Mongeau, Shake-Awakes (Tradewind Books)
• Sara O’Leary and Julie Morstad, When I Was Small (Simply Read)

Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize:

• Glen Huser, The Runaway (Tradewind)
• Pamela Porter, I’ll Be Watching (Groundwood)
• Karen Rivers, What is Real (Orca)
• Caitlyn Vernon, Nowhere Else on Earth: Standing Tall for the Great Bear Rainforest (Orca)
• Moira Young, Blood Red Road (Doubleday Canada)

Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award:

• Chuck Davis, The Chuck Davis History of Metropolitan Vancouver (Harbour)
• Charlotte Gill, Eating Dirt (Greystone)
• Fred Herzog, Fred Herzog: Photographs (Douglas & McIntyre Editions)
• Gary Hynes, Island Wineries of British Columbia (TouchWood)
• Robert J. Wiersema, Walk Like a Man: Coming of Age with the Music of Bruce Springsteen (Greystone)

Esi Edugyan, Emma Donoghue make Orange Prize longlist

Esi Edugyan

In honour of International Women’s Day, the Orange Prize for Fiction, celebrating “excellence, originality, and accessibility in women’s writing,” has announced its 2012 longlist, which includes two celebrated Canadian authors.

Emma Donoghue, whose novel Room was shortlisted for the 2011 Orange Prize and won the 2010 Writers’ Trust Prize, is nominated for The Sealed Letter, a 2008 novel published by HarperCollins. Picador reissued a special paperback version for the U.K. market in early 2012, one of 12 titles marking the publisher’s 40th anniversary.

Donoghue is accompanied by fellow Canadian Esi Edugyan, who made the longlist with Half-Blood Blues (Thomas Allen Publishers), which won the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was  nominated today for the B.C. Book Prize.

Here is the Orange Prize longlist:

• Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues (Thomas Allen Publishers)
• Karin Altenberg, Island of Wings (House of Anansi Press)
• Aifric Campbell, On the Floor (Serpent’s Tail/Consortium)
• Leah Hager Cohen, The Grief of Others (Riverhead/Penguin)
• Emma Donoghue, The Sealed Letter (HarperCollins)
• Anne Enright, The Forgotten Waltz (McClelland & Stewart)
• Roopa Farooki, The Flying Man (Headline Review)
• Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule (Vintage Canada)
• Georgina Harding, Painter of Silence (Bloomsbury)
• Jane Harris, Gillespie and I (HarperCollins)
• Francesca Kay, The Translation of the Bones (Phoenix)
• A.L. Kennedy, The Blue Book (Jonathan Cape)
• Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus (Doubleday Canada)
• Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (HarperCollins)
• Cynthia Ozick, Foreign Bodies (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Thomas Allen)
• Ann Patchett, State of Wonder (HarperCollins)
• Ali Smith, There but for the (Penguin)
• Anna Stothard, The Pink Hotel (Alma Books)
• Stella Tillyard, Tides of War (Vintage Canada)
• Amy Waldman, The Submission (HarperCollins)

Judged by Joanna Trollope, Lisa Appignanesi, Victoria Derbyshire, Natalie Haynes, and Natasha Kaplinksy, the Orange Prize awards the winner with a cheque for £30,000 and a limited-edition bronze figurine known as “Bessie.” The shortlist will be announced April 17 and the awards ceremony takes place May 30.

Téa Obreht surprises with Orange Prize win

Serbian-American author Téa Obreht has won the Orange Prize for Fiction for her novel The Tiger’s Wife. At only 25 years old, the New York–based writer is the youngest winner in the prize’s 16-year history.

Obreht’s win came as a surprise to many, including those U.K. bookies who had placed their bets on Emma Donoghue’s Room. But Donoghue won’t be returning to Canada empty-handed: yesterday Room was declared winner of the Orange Youth Prize. Six teenagers picked Donoghue’s novel from the Orange prize shortlist, which also included Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love, Emma Henderson’s Grace Williams Says it Loud, Nicole Krauss’s Great House, and fellow Canadian Kathleen Winter’s Annabel. Amazon.co.uk also declared Room the most popular, with 69 per cent of the shortlist’s sales.

The Orange prize celebrates “excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing.” The winner receives a cheque for £30,000.

Book links round-up: Winter, Donoghue make Orange shortlist, Crummey’s IMPAC nod, and more

• Kathleen Winter and Emma Donoghue shortlisted for 2011 Orange Prize; judge declares women’s writing in “rude health”
• Michael Crummey’s Galore is the only Canadian novel on the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award shortlist
• Winnipeg artist Ray Fenwick transforms used book covers into typographical art
• What your favourite childhood book says about you now
• This link brought to you by Amazon’s cheaper model Kindle, now with ad content

Donoghue, Winter make Orange Prize longlist

A pair of Canadians are among the 20 women on the 16th annual Orange Prize for Fiction longlist. Emma Donoghue (Room) and Kathleen Winter (Annabel) are both in contention for the book award, which recognizes “excellence, originality, and accessibility” in fiction written in English by women from around the world.

The shortlist will be announced April 12 and the winners revealed at a ceremony in London on June 8. The winner receives a prize of £30,000 and a bronze “Bessie” statuette created and donated by artist Grizel Niven.

Daily book biz round-up: e-readers read you; manga crackdown; and more

Today’s book news:

• Your e-reader knows too much
• Oprah’s Dickens picks not flying off shelves
• Sorry boys: Japanese cracking down on “extreme sex acts” in manga titles
• Orange Prize judges announced
• Room and The Imperfectionists make B&N Best of 2010 list

Daily book biz round-up: book thrown at Obama; Kindle Singles; and more

Today’s book news:

• Paperback thrown at Obama
• Adam Gopnik wonders what literary prizes are for
• Amazon launches Kindle Singles (not to be confused with Kraft Singles)
• Salman Rushdie to write memoir about years in hiding
• Orange Prize organizers drop award for new writers
• Emma Donoghue’s Room bookshelf

Daily book biz round-up: iPad security breach; on reading New Yorker fiction; and more

Book news pour vous:

• Early iPad adopters exposed to massive security breach
• Barbara Kingsolver wins Orange Prize
• Atwood to headline Frye Festival in 2011
• Only female candidate for Oxford professor of poetry position withdraws from race, citing “serious flaws” in election process
• Some Kindle titles more expensive in U.S. than in Canada
• Better writing through not linking
• On the joys and perils of reading The New Yorker‘s fiction selections
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