November 22nd, 2007
Another award Ian McEwan won’t be winning…
After being pipped for the Booker Prize by Anne Enright, now Ian McEwan hasn’t made the shortlist for the Costa book Award (formerly The Whitbread Prize). After the Booker, the Costa is one of the most high profile UK literary prizes and McEwan is not even in the running to win it. I liked On Chesil Beach but can see why many people view it as a novella, rather than a novel.
In the Costa First Novel category, the nominees are all women, and my money is on Catherine O’Flynn’s compelling novel about a disappeared little girl, What Was Lost, published by the independent publisher Tindal Street Press .
The clean sweep of women in this category reminds me of the hoo haa about the New Writing Ventures Award shortlist. When it was announced in August it was the subject of much discussion as eight of the nine nominees were female.
Just a fluke or are women writing better contemporary fiction than men?
November 22nd, 2007 at 4:18 pm
Perhaps it’s just a lot harder for men to get published these days?
A friend in a publishing house told me they only read female contributions to their slush pile since the onset of the chick-lit sex and shopping novels phenomenon.
I appreciate that we’re talking a different end of the market with the Whitbread, but I wonder if there is a knock-on effect throughout the entire publishing market?
November 22nd, 2007 at 9:02 pm
Noooo! Never - i think it’s pretty impossible to beat the heavyweight American males when it comes to contemp: Ford, Powers, DeLillo (with the exception of his last couple), Auster et al. Tbh I have found this year very disappointing for fiction, and I don’t get a lot of the lovebombing of women writers at the moment. I tried What Was Lost but didn’t like it at all. It’s probably just me and my subjectivity
November 22nd, 2007 at 9:04 pm
P.S. although i might read the A.L. Kennedy one as her short fiction is rather fab! (As an aside, women ten dto do short fiction *very* *very* well!)
November 23rd, 2007 at 12:39 am
i thought the whitbread prize was for yachts.
November 23rd, 2007 at 4:51 am
I think the author of What was Lost is Catherine O’Flynn, not O’Mahony.
Also, McEwan *is* on the longlist of another upcoming Award, The Literary Review Bad Sex Award![chortle]
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2215521,00.html
November 23rd, 2007 at 10:58 am
JC, it’s hard to say. The only people I actually physically know in a have-a-cup-of-coffee-with who’ve recently got book deals are men. Maybe the bias is just with these prizes? Or else we’re all imagining it?
TGWAOF, I think we have polar opposite taste in books.
AL Kennedy is an amazing writer, though. A friend told me last night she has a copy of an Auster book for me that I haven’t read - and is only 100 pages. Happy days.
For work at the moment I’m reading the Julia Kelly book (With My Lazy Eye) and - eek - Sophie Dahl’s novel.
OFTR, you’re not far wrong, you know…
Sang, a freudian slip on my part as I was talking to someone of the same name yesterday and it must have stuck in my head. My own laptop is in meltdown so wasn’t able to fix that until now. Fingers crossed I haven’t lost everything on it.
November 24th, 2007 at 12:13 am
….curiousity.
November 26th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
Wouldn’t go that far, Sinead. The heavyweight men are beginning to give up their respective ghosts, but most of them still stand. Roth’s latest was better than most critics made it out to be, Coetzee’s Bad Year is wonderful and John Banville’s venture into Crime Fiction has been more than just interesting. He’s also in the midst of writing a 15th novel under his own name.
Give it 10 or 20 years though. There are far fewer emerging male writers, I think.