Daily book biz round-up, March 12

Come ‘n get yer scoops:

• Hilary Mantel wins National Book Critics Circle Award
• Margaret Atwood to sing her little heart out in Score: A Hockey Musical. And if you don’t believe that, here’s some pics.
• Crummey and Mitchell win Commonwealth book prizes
• You can’t have an iPad yet, but you can pay for one right now!
• More breathless iPad revelations: book selections to be categorized … and sub-categorized!
• Hachette Livre takes off glove, slaps Paris Book Fair in face
• “Unknown mid-list author from Canada” begs for dough on Dragon’s Den
• Macmillan CEO (and heartthrob) John Sargent ponders the “thorny” problem of e-books and libraries
• John Sargent again, this time taking questions from his adoring fans

Gloria Vanderbilt (!) and Exile Editions announce new literary prize for emerging Canadian writers

The American author, heiress, and mother of CNN’s Anderson Cooper has established an annual short fiction prize for Canadian writers in conjunction with Exile Editions. She’ll be in Toronto on March 13 to launch the prize at the Turf Lounge. From the release:

Ms. Vanderbilt, who has two short stories and a suite of paintings in a recent issue of Exile: The Literary Quarterly (33.3), will announce a prize of $2000 for short fiction, open to any and all emerging Canadian writers, a prize to be awarded for the first time in April of 2011 under the auspices of Exile in memory of her son, Carter V. Cooper. The winner of the prize – to be chosen from among a group of finalists by Ms. Vanderbilt – will be presented annually. Each year, the finalists’ stories are to be published in an anthology, by Exile Editions, and released the day of the prize announcement.

“High in antioxidants, low on caffeine”: Leah McLaren weighs in on CanLit

Globe and Mail columnist Leah McLaren is the latest public figure to opine on the state of Can Lit. Prompted by this year’s awards season, McLaren takes the discussion one step further (or, perhaps backward) by flat-out refusing to read any nominated titles.

Beyond wondering who does Annabel Lyon’s hair and if Margaret Atwood is “pissed” by her exclusion from several major shortlists, McLaren simply cannot deign to read jury-selected books, voracious reader though she claims to be. Which, of course, more than qualifies her to weigh in on the subject.

In Saturday’s column, she cautions against the dangers of reading what “the man” tells you to:

[...] despite all the good that literary prizes provide — and I say this as a member of the Authors’ Committee of the Writers’ Trust of Canada — there is also an inherent danger in their increasing cultural primacy.

As one Canadian writer who did not want his name used recently said to me in an e-mail, the problem with prize lists is that they take something intimate and eclectic and turn it into a socially sanctioned Cultural Event.

“Reading — unlike multiplex movie-going, say — is inherently idiosyncratic,” he wrote. “Its idiosyncrasy is in its strength, the breadth of library and bookstore choices offering a feast of discoveries for the curious and story-hungry. Prizes, on the other hand, ultimately work to shape a vast plurality of tastes into a single, institutionally endorsed selection. The Giller is a successful venture, no question about it. But successful at what? Bringing new readers to exciting, boundary-pushing, pleasure-filled books? Or calcifying CanLit into a predictable brand?”

She also likens prize lists to high-school English curricula and the content of prison libraries. Given this year’s sombre selections, it could be argued that McLaren has a point. Besides, who better to judge the state of CanLit than the author of the “giggly, airy” Continuity Girl?

British lit prizes, reading habits, and more

• The shortlist for the Dylan Thomas Prize has been announced, and six young writers are in line to win the £60,000 (approximately $114,000 CAD) prize. The global award, given biennially, was established to promote writing among young people.

• The Independent hits the streets to see what Brits are reading.

• A Montana judge has sentenced 74-year-old James Brubaker to 30 months in jail for stealing books and documents from over 100 U.S. and Alberta libraries. Brubaker hit the University of Calgary, and some of his booty included “an eight volume facsimile recreation of the original journals of the Lewis and Clark voyages worth more than $2,000.”

Rawi Hage wins IMPAC

Montreal author Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game has won one of the world’s richest literary prizes. The debut novel, published here by House of Anansi Press, was announced today as the winner of this year’s IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award, worth €100,000 (roughly $160,000 Canadian). Hage is only the second Canadian to win in the 13-year history of the prize – Alistair MacLeod won in 2001 for No Great Mischief – and his book is the first debut novel (CORRECTION: debut book) to win.

The win comes at a good time for Hage, with his second novel, Cockroach, poised for release in just a couple of months and an appearance at the BookExpo Canada trade show set for Sunday. (See Q&Q‘s cover profile of the author, from the brand-new July/August 2008 issue, here.) Anansi is also releasing a new edition of De Niro’s Game with a new cover, an IMPAC emblem, and a lower price of $14.95 (down from $18.95.)

The IMPAC selection process begins with nominations from public libraries around the world. De Niro’s Game emerged from a longlist of 137 titles and a shortlist of eight. The jury was made up of international authors: Spain’s José Luis de Juan, Britain’s Patricia Duncker, Ireland’s Eibhlín Evans, Nigeria’s Helon Habila, and Pakistan’s Aamer Hussein. The jury citation said of the novel, “Its originality, its power, its lyricism, as well as its humane appeal all mark De Niro’s Game as the work of a major literary talent and make Rawi Hage a truly deserving winner.”

Laying out the welcome mat for author Stephen Harper

In an article posted on workopolis.com, author Susan Swan welcomes Stephen Harper to the world of publishing by offering him a few tips for his upcoming book on the history of hockey.

Swan uses Harper’s “day job” as prime minister to segue into criticisms of the government’s slashing of funding for cultural programs abroad and comments about the difficulties and limitations of obtaining grants and literary prizes.

You mentioned that the research for your book has slowed down since you became our 22nd prime minister. Naturally, I wasn’t surprised, and I thought of suggesting that you try for Ontario’s $1,500 emerging writers’ grant and hire your own researcher. Like all emerging writers in Ontario, you are entitled to apply, although this modest start-up will barely cover a researcher’s fee for any more than a month. Nor will it help much to offset some of your moving costs, Mr. Prime Minister, if, God forbid, you lose your day job in another election.

…

Alas, the funding that once helped Canadian writers reach their world audiences has vanished. Thanks to you slashing $11.8-million from our cultural programs abroad, 30 years of support has gone overnight. Alas again, our cultural diplomats who were once employed to promote our culture abroad now have no way to publicize anything, let alone our writing. And knowing the stock you place in short-term results, these hard-working folks may soon be out of a job altogether.

As covered in Q&Q Omni today, The Writer’s Union of Canada, of which Swan is vice-chair, held a demonstration on Parliament Hill yesterday to draw attention to the financial and cultural contributions the arts make to Canada.

Marchand on the Giller

The Toronto Star‘s regular book critic and culture columnist, Philip Marchand, has a column up about this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist, announced this past week. He confesses to having felt some unease at the announcement of the longlist back in September, mostly due to its seeming emphasis on the inclusion of writers who, as the accompanying statement from the Giller jury put it, “populate every region.” Marchand detected a familiar cultural problem rearing its head:

The list had a faint whiff of political correctness, in short. It made me recall the press conference announcing the founding of the prize in 1994 and the late Mordecai Richler, one of the three initial judges, along with Alice Munro and University of Ottawa English professor David Staines, proclaiming, “All three of us are politically incorrect. Looking for the first winner, we will not favour young writers over old writers, or vice versa. We won’t favour a book written by a woman over a man, or a black, gay or native writer, any more than somebody whose family has been here for 200 years.”The criterion was to be strictly literary quality. What a concept! Richler’s comments at the time reflected widespread unease over the Governor General’s Awards for literature, a suspicion that juries for these awards were increasingly all too aware of the need for diversity in handing out prizes — the children’s birthday party syndrome. Make sure everybody gets a prize. Although Richler did not mention regions, the biggest bugaboo in this regard was certainly regional.

Marchand, though he still thinks releasing a longlist has as much to do with politics as marketing, feels much better about the shortlist. He especially approves of the small press-bent of the list, and of the inclusion of two titles in translation.

(Which goes to show, we guess, that the definition of “political correctness” can be a slippery one.)

Related links:
Read Philip Marchand’s column on the Giller shortlist

India comes to Frankfurt

India will be the guest of honour at the 2006 Frankfurt Book Fair. To represent its massive, booming literature and publishing industry, India will be sending a somewhat meagre delegation of 33 writers. The Literary Saloon directs us to Outlook India’s Bibliofile column, which says that the selection “made by a steering committee headed by the secretary, HRD ministry and included other quasi-government organs like the Sahitya Akademi” has inevitably ruffled a few feathers among those many thousands of writers left off the list.

In order to help smooth things over, India’s National Book Trust has “sent 14 semi-finalists to the Leipzig Fair in March. Another lot will go in September. As further consolation prizes, it also sent a list of 150 books – an awesome balancing act of regional quotas — to German publishers to print before the fair. There was a bribe too: a subsidy of Rs2 a word for every book they published. But the ‘finicky’ Germans didn’t bite.”

According to Bibliofile, the NBT will also be screening a number of Indian movies at the Fair. Here’s hoping the ‘wet sari’ look takes off in Germany this fall.

Related links:
Read Outlook India’s Bibliofile column
The Frankfurt Book Fair’s “India Guest of Honour” site

Writing what you know

Kudos to the Georgia Straight, the Vancouver weekly that, under the stewardship of John Burns, regularly provides excellent book coverage, for publishing the entire acceptance speech that Jack Hodgins gave last weekend at the BC Book Prizes. The Comox-born writer was picking up the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence and spoke about how he came to write about his neck of the woods after trying to ape the style and locations of writers like Faulkner and Steinbeck.

“It occurred to me that perhaps I’d found a gold mine in my own back yard,” he said. “I began to fashion stories out of bits and pieces of the life around me, the life I remembered from my childhood, and the life that was reported to me by the tale-carriers. Of course I had to tone things down a bit so people elsewhere would believe me. Even so, those far to the east thought I was making it all up out of an imagination given to gross exaggeration, while people on Vancouver Island were not shy about saying ‘That was a pretty good story there, Hodgins, but I could’ve told you a better one. Why don’t you tell them what it’s really like?’”

Related links:
Click here for the Georgia Straight article

Breaking down the Griffin

Toronto writer Barbara Carey has a piece on the CBC Arts site today that runs down the contenders for this year’s Griffin Poetry Prize. But perhaps most notable for Carey is what is not in the lists for the Canadian and international prizes. She writes: “What’s immediately striking about this year’s finalists is that lyric narrative, arguably the most dominant form of poetry in English, is conspicuously absent. Instead, the judges — Britain’s Lavinia Greenlaw, Eliot Weinberger of the United States and Vancouver-based Lisa Robertson — have opted for work that’s non-linear, often flamboyantly unconventional and far ranging in cultural references.”

Related links:
Click here for the CBC Arts story