Bookseller Industry Awards 2013 - Shortlist

The Bookseller Industry awards for excellence across the book trade, now in its 4th year, aims to aupport and celebrate all areas of the business.  There are 19 categories covering all aspects of the world of publishing with the shortlist in each set out below.  The awards will be presented on the night of 13th May at the London Hilton in Park Lane.

Academic, Educational and Professional Publisher of the Year
Bloomsbury Publishing;Collins Learning;Oxford University Press;Pearson ;SAGE Publications
Imprint and Editor of the Year
Venetia Butterfield; Viking;Alessandro Gallenzi; Alma Books/Alma Classics;Nicholas Pearson; Fourth Estate;Matt Phillips; Yellow Jersey Press;Selina Walker; Arrow Books;Rowena Webb; Hodder & Stoughton Non-Fiction;George Weidenfeld; Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Literary Agent of the Year
Sheila Crowley; Curtis Brown;Maggie Hanbury; The Hanbury Agency Ltd;Andrew Lownie; Andrew Lownie Literary Agency;Ben Mason; Fox Mason Limited;Sarah Such; Sarah Such Literary Agency
Gordon Wise; Curtis Brown
Rights Professional of the Year
Jason Bartholomew; Hodder & Stoughton;Kate Hibbert; Little, Brown Book Group;Ruth Logan; Hot Key Books;Rachel Mills; Peters Fraser & Dunlop;Tracy Phillips; Simon & Schuster Children's Books;Mary Thompson; HarperCollins
Independent Academic, Educational and Professional Publisher of the Year
Crown House Publishing ;Edward Elgar Publishing;John Catt Educational;Jordan Publishing;
Royal Academy Publications;Woodhead Publishing
Publicity Campaign of the Year
Fifty Shades of Grey by E L James; Charlotte Bush and Natalie Higgins, Arrow Books
HHhH by Laurent Binet; Fiona Murphy, Harvill Secker
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey; Samantha Eades, Headline
A Street Cat Named Bob by James Bowen; Emma Knight and Emilie Ferguson, Hodder
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Third Wheel by Jeff Kinney; Tania Vian-Smith, Puffin
Marketing Campaign of the Year
Is It Just Me? by Miranda Hart; Hodder & Stoughton
The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling; Little, Brown
Tony Robinson's Weird World of Wonders; Macmillan Children's Books
Thinking Fast and Slow;Daniel Kahneman; Penguin
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Third Wheel; Puffin
Fifty Shades Trilogy; Random House
The Titanic Campaign - Commemorating the 100th Anniversary; The History Press
Where's Wally? 25th Anniversary Campaign; Walker Books
Independent Publisher of the Year
Alma Books;Carlton Publishing Group;Constable & Robinson;Igloo Books;Icon Books;Osprey Group;Summersdale Publishers;Unbound
Children's Publisher of the Year
DK;Egmont UK;HarperCollins Children's Books;Igloo Books;Nosy Crow;Penguin Children's Books
Scholastic Children's Books;Walker Books
Digital Strategy of the Year
Bloomsbury Publishing;Harlequin UK;Kobo ;Nosy Crow;Penguin;Pottermore;Orion Publishing Group;The Random House Group
Publisher of the Year
DK;Faber and Faber;The Folio Society;HarperCollins;Pan Macmillan;Penguin;Orion Publishing Group;The Random House Group
Children's Independent Bookseller of the Year
The Barefoot Books Studio;The Bookmark;Children's Bookshop, Muswell Hill;Octavia's Bookshop
Tales on Moon Lane;Winstone's
Manager of the Year
Marion Akehurst; Blackwell's, Wellcome Collection
Georgina Hanratty; Tales on Moon Lane, London
Marjory Marshall; The Bookmark, Grantown-on-Spey
Angela Pickard; Bridge Bookshop, Isle of Man
Ian Owens; Waterstones, Argyle Street, Glasgow
Sue Butterworth Young Bookseller of the Year sponsored by HarperCollins
Socrates Adams ; Blackwell's, Manchester
Kate Double; Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights, Bath
Iona Dudley; Waterstones Piccadilly, London
Rebecca Duncan; Books@Hoddesdon, Hoddesdon
Jonathan O'Brien; Waterstones Oxford Street Plaza, London
Adam Pollard; The Willoughby Book Club
Rachael Wing; The Wallingford Bookshop, Wallingford
Children's Bookseller of the Year sponsored by Usborne
Eason & Sons;Foyles Bookshop;Sainsbury's;The Works
Library of the Year
Devon Libraries;Dorking Library;Dudley Libraries;Dundee Library and Information Service
City of Edinburgh Library Service;Nottingham Library and Information Service
Redbridge Central Library
Independent Bookseller of the Year sponsored by Gardners
Atkinson-Pryce Books; Biggar
Chapter One; Reading
Dulwich Books; London
Falmouth Bookseller; Falmouth
Linghams Bookshop; Wirral
Octavia's Bookshop; Gloucester
O'Mahony's Booksellers; Limerick
Winstones; Sherborne
National Bookseller
Blackwell's;Foyles Bookshop;Eason & Sons ;Morrisons ;The Works
The Supply Chain Innovation Award sponsored by BIC
Macmillan Distribution;Mainline Flatpacks Ltd;Publiship;SkanTrans-PSL Limited

Women's Prize for Fiction 2013 - Longlist announced

The longlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction has been announced.  The £30,000 prize, formerly sponsored by Orange, is this year being funded by a group of individual donors including Cherie Blair and Martha Lane Fox although founder Kate Mosse has said a permanent sponsor is being sought for 2014 onwards.  The long list of 20 women writers is as follows:

Kitty Aldridge A Trick I Learned From Dead Men (Jonathan Cape)
Kate Atkinson Life After Life (Doubleday)
Ros Barber The Marlowe Papers (Sceptre)
Shani Boianjiu The People of Forever are Not Afraid (Hogarth)
Gillian Flynn Gone Girl (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Sheila Heti How Should A Person Be? (Harvill Secker)
A M Homes May We Be Forgiven (Granta)
Barbara Kingsolver Flight Behaviour (Faber)
Deborah Copaken Kogan The Red Book (Virago)
Hilary Mantel Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)
Bonnie Nadzam Lamb (Hutchinson)
Emily Perkins The Forrests (Bloomsbury Circus)
Michèle Roberts Ignorance (Bloomsbury)
Francesca Segal The Innocents (Chatto & Windus)
Maria Semple Where’d You Go, Bernadette (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Elif Shafak Honour (Viking)
Zadie Smith NW (Hamish Hamilton)
M L Stedman The Light Between Oceans (Doubleday)
Carrie Tiffany Mateship with Birds (Picador)
G. Willow Wilson Alif the Unseen (Corvus Books)

The shortlist will be announced on 16th April 2013 and the awards ceremony will be held on 5th June.

Knight's grave under Edinburgh Car Park

Archaeologists excavating a building site and former car park in Edinburgh's Old Town made an exciting discovery when they unearthed what they believe to be the foundations of a monastery built by a mediaeval King of Scotland.

Three buildings of historical significance were known to be associated with the site, the 18th century Old High School, the 16th century Royal High School and the 13th century Blackfriars monastery.

The monastery was founded in 1230 by King Alexander II of Scotland.  The exact location of he monastery, destroyed around 1588 during the Protestant Reformation, has since been unknown so this is a very significant discovery in attempting to understand Edinburgh's mediaeval past. Among the artefacts uncovered was a sandstone slab carved with a Calvary Cross and an ornate sword suggesting the grave of a mediaeval knight.  A further examination is being made of the associated skeleton to ascertain where the person was born and how he lived.

I mentioned in previous blogs the work of Michael Harrison exploring the continuity of usage in city ccentres.  Its interesting to note that this car park has been associated with seats of learning going back nearly a thousand years at least. Currently the Department of Archaeology of Edinburgh University is sited just yards from the excavation site.

London Chocolate Festival 2013

The London Chocolate Festival will run from 22 - 24 March  at the Southbank Centre where you will be able to sample sweet and savoury creations and cocktails.  You can become a choc swot with free workshops.  Details can be found at www.festivalchocolate.co.uk.

This comes under the 'Things you didn't know about your own family' heading as I have only recently learnt that my great uncle and aunt, returning from a spell living in Australia to their native Worcester, trained as chocolatiers, opened a chocolate shop and gave classes to would-be chocolate-makers. This would have been in the 1930s I guess so this is not a new phenomenon.

For those living outside London other chocolate festivals are being held at Easter in Bristol (home to Rowntrees), where you can have your portrait painted in chocolate and join a tour of a chocolate factory. The Bristol Chocolate Festival is on 30-31 March details from the website above.  For those oop north there is the York Chocolate Festival (home to Terrys) being held 29 March - 1 April.  Chocolate traders across the north-east promise to tempt you with cakes, biscuits and hand-made chocolates.  They are also offering chocolate dinners, workshops and demos details of which can be found on their website at www.yorkchocolatefestival.co.uk.

If you succumb to that lot you might like to know that the 33rd London Marathon leaves Greenwich Park on 21st April.  Fortunately I am way too old for that!
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Quadriga Gallery - The Birth of Archaeology Exhibition

This is one I have pencilled in my diary for later this month.

The Quadriga Gallery is a new space at the Wellington Arch in London's Hyde Park dedicated to a series of exhibitions exploring the past, present and future of England's heritage.  This year, to mark the centenary of the passing of the Ancient Monuments Act in 1913 five special exhibitions are being staged to highlight the movement to protect England's heritage from its early days to tomorrow's challenges.

In 1859 two crucial events changed the way people regarded human development.  A flint handaxe was found in a gravel quarry level with bones of extinct animals and in the same year Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species challenging (I would rather say enlarging on) the accepted Biblical version of creation.

The exhibition at Wellington Arch tells the story of what happened next as pioneers in archaeology battled to save Britain's prehistoric sites from destruction.  The display focuses on the work of three men in particular, scientist Charles Darwin, archaeologist/anthropologist General Pitt-Rivers and banker and politician (not all bad then) John Lubbock.  Together they fought to bring recognition and protection for Britain's ancient monuments.

Wellington Arch is at Apsley Way, Hyde Park Corner, London W1J 7JZ and details of tickets, opening times and transport can be found on the English Heritage website at http://ow.ly/irC7d
The exhibition runs until 21 April 2013.

Commonwealth Games 2014 Cultural Events

The organisers of the 2014 Commonwealth Games to be held in Glasgow are planning a world-class cultural programme to rival the Edinburgh Festival to complement this major sporting event to be staged next year. 

Dozens of arts events are being lined up which will be designed to spill out into the streets of Scotland's second city over a two-week period before and during the games themselves as part of a £4 million programme of events involving the city's galleries, museums and performing arts companies.

Funding to the tune of grants up to £300,000 has already been provided and the fund is said already to be 'hugely oversubscribed' after being opened to artists, events, organisers and companies across the country last year.

Julian Barnes on Sex in Novels

Julian Barnes, one of my favourite contemporary authors, has complained that modern authors are under 'a commercial obligation' to include sex scenes in their work.  This is an area notoriously difficult to get right as witnessed by the annual Literary Review Bad Sex Awards and perhaps explains why a lot of novelists choose to target a pre-pubescent audience which avoids the necessity for including anything beyond a chaste kiss.

Julian Barnes suggests that the new 'freedom' (ie post Lady Chatterly) which writers have can lead to the problem of striking the right balance between how much to describe explicitly and how much to omit in the interests of taste and decency.

As an admirer of Flaubert (his novel 'Flaubert's Parrot' was a masterly study of the French writer) Julian Barnes should simply follow Flaubert's advice.  Flaubert was himself very keen on writing about sex (very French) but he made it a golden rule and the writer should never use a coarse word or be too explicit.  His 'disciple' Guy de Maupassant always followed this strict instruction with the result that he is one of the very best writers about sex. My advice is follow Flaubert's advice and you can't go wrong.

Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 for his novel The Sense of an Ending.

My book 'The Lady in Grey' is a fictional biography of Guy de Maupassant which includes most of Flaubert's advice and is available from www.amazon.com or www.amazon.co.uk in paperback or as a Kindle download.

BFI 57th London Film Festival Dates Announced

The dates for the 57th London Film Festival have been announced by the British Film Institute.  The 2013 Festival will run from Wednesday 9th until Sunday 20th October 2013.

Submissions are now open for both feature films and short films.

The London Film Festival aims to champion creativity, originality, vision and imagination through its annual showcase of feature films, documentaries, short films, animation and excperimental films from around the world.  The festival attracts large public audiences to venues across the capital bringing leading international film-makers, new talent, industry professionals and the media to London for a 12-day celebration of cinema.

Last year's festival hosted 227 feature films and 111 short films from 57 countries including 13 World Premieres. 570 film-maker guests drew the highest ever audience attendance of 151,000 including a record number of industry delegates. 

The full programme for the 2013 festival will be announced in September.

British Pie Week - Bacon Pie recipe

This week is British Pie Week running from 4 - 10th March.  Here is my contribution to celebrate the great British Pie, a cheap and nutritious pie ideal for feeding a family on a budget.

Bacon Pie
Ingredients
1 - 2 tablespoons of sage and onion stuffing mix (or home-made stuffing, see below)
boiling water
8 oz sausage meat
1-2 tablespoons tomato puree or chutney
3/4 lb of bacon pieces (offcuts from bacon joint)
8 oz shortcrust pastry
2 - 3 tomatoes (optional)

Home-made sage and onion stuffing (more faff than the mix but much nicer)
peel and chop 1 onion and boil in water in a small saucepan until the onion is soft
put the onion in a food processor and zap or chop it very finely on a chopping board
grate or zap in food processor two or three slices of white bread to make breadcrumbs
mix the onion and breadcrumbs with 1/2 tablespoon of dried sage
mix the whole lot with 1 oz of melted butter and a spoonful of milk to make a paste

(alternatively make up the stuffing mix with melted butter and boiling water as per the instructions on the packet.)

To make the pie
Stir the sausage meat and tomato puree or chutney with your sage and onion stuffing.  Remove the rind and fat from the bacon pieces and chop the meat fairly finely (you can sometimes find this done for you in the supermarket) and mix with the sausage mixture.

Roll out half the pastry and line a 9-inch pie plate.  Spread the sausage mixture filling over this.  If you like tomatoes slice them up and arrange in a layer over the filling.  Roll out the remaining pastry to cover the pie.  Trim, seal and flute the edges and make two or three slashes in the top to allow steam to escape.  Glaze with egg or milk and bake at Mark 6 (Gas), or 400 degrees (Electric) for 20 - 30 mins until golden then reduce the heaqt to Mark 3 (325 degrees) for a further 20-30 minutes.  Serves Six to eight portions.

Book Festivals - March 2013

Essex Book Festival was launched on Friday 20 February and runs all month.  Lined-up to appear at the festival are celebrity authors Andrew Cowan, Anthony Horowitz, Rachel Joyce and Sandi Toksvig.

In Cumbria the Way with Words Festival also launched yesterday with guest speakers Chris Mullin, Jack Straw and Pat Barker.  The Way with Words Festival runs until 10th March.

Happy St David's Day - Mam's Welsh Cakes

Happy St David's Day, especially to the Welsh contingent.  To celebrate here is my grandmother's recipe for Welsh cakes.

Ingredients
8 oz flour
2 oz butter
2 oz lard
2 oz currants or sultanas
3 oz sugar
1/2 teaspoon mixed spice
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 egg
pinch salt
1 tablespoon milk or cream

Method
Sift the flour, baking powder and salt together. Rub in the fat with your fingertips and add the other dry ingredients. Beat the egg lightly and add with enough milk (or cream for a posher version) to make a firm paste.  Roll out on a floured board to a thickness of 1/4 inch and cut into rounds.  Cook on a lightly greased griddle or a heavy flat-bottomed frying pan for about 3 minutes each side until golden brown.  Cool and sprinkle with caster sugar.  Split and serve with butter or cream and jam.  They can also be kept in an air-tight tin and eaten alone as biscuits - excellent with coffee for dunking.