Weekend: Book NEWS Round-up

WINNER OF THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2015 ANNOUNCED

British novelist Ali Smith was announced, Wednesday, as winner of the 2015 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Shami Chakrabarti, Chair of Judges, said of Smith’s winning novel 'How To Be Both': “Ancient and modern meet and speak to each other in this tender, brilliant and witty novel of grief, love, sexuality and shape-shifting identity.”

'How to Be Both' is a novel all about art’s versatility. Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it’s a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There’s a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real – and all life’s givens get given a second chance.

'How to Be Both' was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, won the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize and Saltire Literary Book of the Year 2014 award. In 2007 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was made a CBE for Services to Literature in the 2014 New Year’s Honours List.

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'THE TRILLIUM' FINALISTS ANNOUNCED

The Trillium, sponsored by the Ontario government, awards prizes of $20,000 to authors in four categories — English language, French language, children's literature in French language and poetry in English language. Winners will be announced Wednesday, June 17, at a private dinner in Toronto.

Nominated authors will read from their works at a public event on Wednesday, June 16, in the Bram & Bluma Appel Salon, Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge St., at 7 p.m.

The finalists for the English language category:

James King - 'Old Masters' (Cormorant Books)
Margaret Atwood - 'Stone Mattress' (McClelland & Stewart)
Dionne Brand - 'Love Enough' (Knopf Canada)
Kate Cayley - 'How You Were Born' (Pedlar Press)
Thomas King - 'The Back of the Turtle' (Harper Collins)
Edmund Metatawbin with Alexandra Shimo - 'Up Ghost River' (Knopf Canada).

The Finalists for the French language category:

Martine Batanian -  'Clinique' (Éditions Marchand de feuilles)
Michel Dallaire - 'Violoncelle pour lune d'automne' (Les Éditions L'Interligne)
Blaise Ndala, 'J'irai danser sur la tombe de Senghor' (Les Éditions L'Interligne)

Finalists for the Poetry in English language:
Brecken Hancock - 'Broom Broom' (Coach House Books)
Aisha Sasha John - 'THOU' (BookThug)
Deanna Young - 'House Dreams' (Brick Books).

Finalists for the Children's Literature in French language:
Diya Lim - 'Larouspiol suivi de Les enfants du ciel' (Les Éditions L'Interligne)
Micheline Marchand - 'Mauvaise mine' (Les Éditions L'Interligne).

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PATRICK MCGUINNESS WINS WELSH BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD

Writer Patrick McGuinness has won the Welsh Book of the Year award for the second time in four years. His memoir 'Other People's Countries' is about his childhood in the town of Bouillon on the Belgian border, where his mother was born.

His debut novel 'The Last Hundred Days', a spy thriller inspired by his experience of the 1989 Romanian revolution, had won the award four years ago and was also long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

Read full article HERE.

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AUTHOR OF 'SHAME' FORCED TO FLEE TO AMERICA

According to DW online, the Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen has been forced to leave her country Bangladesh after receiving Islamist death threats. Nasreen is author of 1993 book 'Shame' (Lajja), a novel which is based on the Babri Masjid episode in Ayodhya in which 2,000 people lost their lives in 1992. To read the full article, click HERE.

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AND TO FINISH OFF ...

There is now a Twitter account called Literary Harry that puts One Direction's long-haired, tiny-shorts-wearing, tattooed bay boy into classic and contemporary novels. I kid you not. He's had 5000 followers in just one week. What it does, is that it takes one of the millions of photos of Harry and recommends books whose covers match up with the Harry Styles photo. See HERE.
Source: uk.eonline.com

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