The Sigla Blog

The shortlist for the 2005 Whitbread book awards have been announced and this story should give every aspiring writing hope. Rachel Zadok won this year’s Richard & Judy novel-writing competition and is now in the running for the Whitbread First Novel award. She faces three other books including Tash Aw’s acclaimed The Harmony Silk Factory.

On a similar note, I’m delighted to hear that another scribbling waitress, Patry Francis has gone and landed herself a book deal. Patry also writes a wonderful poetry blog, Waitress Poems and has contributed some of her work to Sigla.

The nominees for the Novel award include Salman Rushdie’s patchy Shalimar The Clown - which the Village Voice accurately dubbed “an honorable failure, a garbled book for garbled times” - along with The Ballad of Lee Cotton by Christopher Wilson, Ali Smith’s Booker shortlisted The Accidental and the surprising choice of Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down.