MSt alumnus Sam Guglani’s Histories has been nominated for the 2018 Edinburgh Book Festival’s First Book Awards.
From the announcement: “Revealing and intimate interlinked collection of stories set in a hospital, written by a doctor … Sam Guglani’s vivid prose has the raw intensity of poetry that pulls the reader in on every page. Histories is a luminous argument for truly seeing and listening to others and to ourselves.”
Read more about the book, and vote for it.
(picture from the Man Booker website)
MSt alumna Daisy Johnson’s novel Everything Under had been longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize.
From the announcement:
“Everything Under, Daisy Johnson (Vintage, Jonathan Cape)
Judges’ comment: “A hypnotic, mythic, unexpected story from a beguiling new voice. Everything Under is an exploration of family, gender, the ways we understand each other and the hands we hold out to each other – a story that’s like the waterways at its heart: you have to take the trip to understand what’s underneath.”
Synopsis: Words are important to Gretel, always have been. As a child, she lived on a canal boat with her mother, and together they invented a language that was just their own. She hasn’t seen her mother since the age of sixteen, though – almost a lifetime ago – and those memories have faded.
Now Gretel works as a lexicographer, updating dictionary entries, which suits her solitary nature. A phone call from the hospital interrupts Gretel’s isolation and throws up questions from long ago. She begins to remember the private vocabulary of her childhood. She remembers other things, too: the wild years spent on the river; the strange, lonely boy who came to stay on the boat one winter; and the creature in the water – a canal thief? – swimming upstream, getting ever closer. In the end there will be nothing for Gretel to do but go back.
Daisy Johnson was born in Paignton, UK, in 1990. Her debut short story collection, Fen, was published in 2016. She is the winner of the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize, the A.M. Heath prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She currently lives in Oxford by the river.”
Read more about the longlist on the prize website, and listen to Daisy talk about her writing with Mariella Frostrup.
MSt tutors Roopa Farooki & Anjali Jospeh are listed in Breaking Ground: Celebrating British Writers of Colour.
from the brochure:
“Highlighting 200 contemporary British writers of colour, the Speaking Volumes Breaking Ground brochure is an indispensible guide to the wealth and depth of diverse writing talent on our doorstep…”
(picture from the RSL website)
MSt tutor Helen Mort has been elected one of the Royal Society of Literature’s “40 under 40”
From the RSL announcement:
“The RSL celebrates not only the United Kingdom’s diverse literary heritage but also the best in contemporary English language writing in Britain. The 40 Under 40 initiative honours the achievements of Britain’s younger writers, and introduces a new generation of writers to the Society’s existing Fellowship of over 500.”
More about the election and all the new Fellows and about Helen.
MSt tutor Helen Mort has won the 2018 Andrew Waterhouse Award for Poetry. “Established in 2000 by New Writing North, the Northern Writers’ Awards supports work-in-progress by new, emerging and established writers across the North of England.”
More information about all of this year’s winners and about Helen.
MSt alumna Stephanie Scott’s novel “The Sentence” is to be published in 2019 by Weidenfeld & Nicholson in June 2019 (U.K. & Commonwealth) and by Doubleday in Spring 2020 (USA &Canada).
Read about it at The Literary Consultancy, The Bookseller (” ‘touching’ Japanese) debut”). The novel was the runner up for the Bridport First Novel Prize in 2017.
From the Weidenfeld & Nicholson press release:
“W&N is delighted to announce the acquisition of a stunning debut by Stephanie Scott a stunning debut by Stephanie Scott, THE SENTENCE.
Within the Tokyo underworld there is an industry which exists to break up marriages. It is known today as wakaresaseya. This business is composed of agents who, for a fee, can be hired by one spouse to seduce the other and provide grounds for divorce on favourable terms. The Sentence tells the story of Takashi Nakamura, a wakaresaseya agent, who is hired by a man to seduce his wife, Rina. But then Rina and Takashi fall in love. So why, at the beginning of the story, is Takashi in prison, accused of Rina’s murder? Now, twenty years later, Rina’s daughter Sumiko decides to find out what really happened.
Stephanie Scott is a graduate of the Faber Academy and was awarded a Distinction for her M.St in Creative Writing at Oxford, as well as a BAJS Toshiba Studentship for her anthropological work on Japan. She has won the AM Heath Prize, the Arvon Jerwood Prize for Literature, the National Centre for Writing Inspires Award and was runner-up for 2017’s Bridport First Novel Award for an early draft of The Sentence.
W&N Publisher, Kirsty Dunseath, bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Antony Harwood, with publication set for early summer 2019. A six-figure deal for US rights has been signed with Doubleday, French rights have been acquired by J.C. Lattes and other translation rights deals are currently being negotiated.
Kirsty Dunseath said: ‘This is a beautiful, touching love story as well as an exploration of human frailty and the tensions between family duty and personal freedom. Stephanie’s writing is exquisite and this story unfurls in unexpected ways as Sumiko tries to make sense of her mother’s past. We are absolutely delighted to welcome Stephanie to W&N”
MSt tutor Anna Beer is appearing in BBC Four’s Unsung Heroines: the Lost World of Female Composers, 22nd June 2018 at 8 pm (UK)
From the BCC Four announcement:
“Danielle de Niese explores the lives and works of five female composers – from the Middle Ages to the late 20th century – who were famous in their lifetimes, but whose work was then forgotten.
Western classical music has traditionally been seen as a procession of male geniuses, but the truth is that women have always composed. Hildegard of Bingen, Francesca Caccini, Clara Schumann, Florence Price and Elizabeth Maconchy – all these women battled to fulfil their ambitions and overcome the obstacles that society placed in their way. They then disappeared into obscurity, and only some have found recognition again.“
From the announcement:
“Using the theme of ‘Otherness and Hospitality’, the TellYours 2018 storytellers will showcase their tales after completing an intense six month professional development programme run by Filotico Arts in collaboration with world-leading storyteller Daniel Morden, award-winning theatre director Jennifer Tang and arts producers Renaissance One and Counterpoint Arts.”
The showcase will take place at Canada Water Theatre on June 19 and Battersea Arts Centre – BAC on June 28, 2018.
MSt tutor Sam Thompson’s new novel Jott has been published by John Murray.
From the publisher’s announcement:
“In February of 1935, two young Irishmen walk in the grounds of a London mental hospital. Arthur Bourne, a junior psychiatrist, is about to jeopardise his future for his closest friend, an aspiring writer called Louis Molyneux.
Arthur has been overshadowed since childhood by his brilliant, troubled friend. But after years of playing the unassuming companion, he is learning that loyalty has its costs: that old friendship may thwart new love, and perhaps even blur distinctions between the sane and the mad . . .
Jott is a story about friendship, madness and modernism from the author of the Man Booker-longlisted Communion Town.”
Read more about it at the John Murray website, and see Sam talk about it
MSt tutor Peter Moore has been awarded the Mary Soames Award for History.
From the press release
“Peter Moore, author of The Sunday Times bestseller “The Weather Experiment”, has been presented with the Mary Soames Award for History at a prestigious ceremony in London this week (Wednesday 13 June). The award was created as a gift to Lady Soames, Sir Winston Churchill’s youngest daughter, to mark her 90th birthday, in 2012, and is given in recognition of achievement in history.
Peter was one of 130 people being honoured at the ceremony to mark the successful completion of their overseas research as Churchill Fellows. Churchill Fellows are funded to travel for 4-8 weeks overseas, researching new ideas that can make a difference to their communities or professions in the UK.
For his Fellowship, Peter travelled to Australia and New Zealand in 2016 to research the story of HM Bark Endeavour. Endeavour famously carried James Cook on his first great voyage, visiting Pacific islands unknown to European geography, charting New Zealand for the first time and the eastern coast of Australia and almost foundering on the Great Barrier Reef.
Peter’s research in Australia and New Zealand informed his forthcoming book, ‘Endeavour: The Ship and the Attitude that Changed the World’, which will be published in the UK on 23 August 2018 (Chatto & Windus) and in the USA (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) shortly afterwards.
Speaking about his Fellowship, Peter said, “It is easy to think that Endeavour’s story belongs firmly in the past. It’s now 250 years since James Cook, Joseph Banks and ninety or so others set out from Plymouth in a tiny coal collier bound for the far side of the world. But the effects of what happened then are still very much being felt today. Being a Churchill Fellow allowed me to follow the story as best I could: meeting academics in Wellington and Canberra and talking to knowledge custodians of indigenous communities on the New South Wales coast and the Bay of Islands.”
“It was an incredibly enriching experience and I’d urge others wanting to travel to broaden their understanding of a subject to apply for a Churchill Fellowship too.”
For more information about the fellowships visit www.wcmt.org.uk
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