LitfestWe’ve just been introduced to a new web-based ‘radio’ station, Audio Book Radio.
It runs a 12 hour programme of readings that loops for a week, featuring work by Hemmingway, Saki, HG Wells, and plenty of others. John Mayfield, who runs it, plans to expand the output to include less known writers and more diverse spoken word performances.
How lovely is it being read to?
So, if you can’t persuade someone to be your regular storytime reader, add it to your bookmarks and enjoy …
Ok hands up all you book cover lovers out there, no don’t be shy, it’s ok to have a secret hankering for old Penguin covers, and now you can shout that love loud, with these jolly picture frames designed specifically to take your favourite book art and show it off to the world.
More info here.
Page turner? Slow worm? Serial shelver? or Double booker?
These are the 4 types of reader as identified in a new survey of the nations reading habits, reported in The Guardian last weekend.
photo © Jonathan Bean
Ok, lets get the depressing bit out of the way and move on, because it seems that men actually don’t read that much (in comparison to women). The gender divide it seems is alive and thriving when it comes to reading habits.
Nearly half of the women surveyed (48%) describe themselves as avid readers (page turners) who cannot put a book down once they begin it, and who will devour a long list of titles in any given year. Men it seems are much less likely (only 26% of men called themselves page turners) to finish a book, and may only complete one or two books in that same period. I’ll put my hands up now and say I’m starting to feel that category sadly includes me, and I’m not proud of it. 2 jobs + 2 kids = 0 free time (note to self – must make more time for reading, if you see me around town you have my full permission to chastise me).
Slow Worms on the other hand take their time but always finish. 32% of the male respondents and 18% of women made up this group.
Serial Shelvers are those whose book shelves heave under the weight of books that yet to be opened and are probably not likely to be (apparently 17% of women and 20% of men fall into this category).
The final type is the Double Booker, this reader tends to have at least two books on the bedside table at any one time having started a second before finishing the first. Interestingly, both men and women are as likely to fall under this category (125 of each) and both claim an ability to flit between two books with ease.
So come on, which are you?
Photo © Jane Bown
Congratulations to Lancasters’ own Paul Farley, Professor of Poetry at Lancaster University who has just been revealed as one of four joint winners of the Royal Society of Literature’s 2008 Jerwood Prize for non-fiction.
The prize is awarded jointly to both Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts for their forthcoming book Edgelands – Journeys into England’s Last Wilderness, set for publication in 2010 by Jonathan Cape. It is the first time the prize has been awarded jointly.
Edgelands is the first non-fiction work by either of the two poets.
“The idea behind Edgelands was a response to the array of rural landscape books currently lining bookshop shelves. Michael and I wanted instead to write about the forgotten areas of our country, the overlooked places on the outskirts of towns that planners refer to as ‘edgelands’, full of business parks, rubbish tips, scrap yards and storage depots. We want to explore and celebrate them.” (Paul Farley).
The Royal Society of Literature and the Jerwood Charitable Foundation offer three annual awards, one of £10,000 and two of £5,000, to authors engaged on their first major commissioned works of non-fiction.
First prize went to Rachel Hewitt for her historical biography of the Ordnance Survey, Map of a Nation, to be published next year by Granta. The fourth award goes to poet Matthew Hollis, for his study Edward Thomas-The Final Years which will be published by Faber next year.
Last Thursday night around 40 people joined the litfest team and writer David Gaffney as he lead us through the soon-to-be-reopened Storey building, reading his specially commissioned, and Storey-inspired short fictions along the way. 
I’m pleased to say we’ve already had some lovely feedback on the event (see some of the comments on this blog and on our twitter page). If you’d like to leave your own comments you can do so at the bottom of this post.
A download of the commissioned stories, entitled “Buildings crying out” is available now from the event page.
The Litfest website is offline this morning for essential maintenance work. Apologies for any inconvenience, we hope to have it back online asap.
For any enquiries please email litfest@gmail.com or phone 01524 62166.
We had the first public event in the new Storey Creative Industries Centre (to give it its full title) last night – David Gaffney reading commissioned stories that reflect the history of the building. It was a mini tour too. And despite having had a tour a few months back, this time triggered a real sense of possibility.
The Tourist Info have already moved in. The floors are down. Signs and emergency lights up. Glass doors open onto angled corridors. Metal stairs lead up to floors that are not yet ‘refurbished’ but still offered for let as cheap studios (I think). It’s scrubbed up well. I don’t know how much of the building is already let, but even with it still half unwrapped it has the feel of a ‘centre’, a place of connections and activity. For the first time I’m feeling excited at our moving in there and what we might achieve in connecting literature with readers, writers with other writers, readers with ideas and feeding a collective imagination.
And given the reduction in our physical and economic resources right now (and probably for some time yet) and the fact that our imaginations are free and limitless, we could do a lot worse than investing in them.
The Orange Prize for Fiction, the UK’s only award for fiction written by women, has just announced the longlist for the 2009 prize.
The 20-strong list includes 6 debut novelists, with 4 titles coming from independent publishers (Faber have 2, while Tindall street and Portobello both have 1).
The list includes Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo. Readers may recall Bernardine gave a talk and a great reading from the book in the Long Room at the Lancaster Maritime Museum for the litfest autumn events programme last October.
Bernardine Evaristo, Lancaster, October 2008
Gaynor Arnold Girl in a Blue Dress (Tindal Street Press)
Lissa Evans Their Finest Hour and a Half (Doubleday)
Bernadine Evaristo Blonde Roots (Hamish Hamilton)
Ellen Feldman Scottsboro (Picador)
Laura Fish Strange Music (Jonathan Cape)
V V Ganeshananthan Love Marriage (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Allegra Goodman Intuition (Atlantic Books)
Samantha Harvey The Wilderness (Jonathan Cape)
Samantha Hunt The Invention of Everything Else (HarvillSecker)
Michelle de Kretser The Lost Dog (Chatto & Windus)
Deirdre Madden Molly Fox’s Birthday (Faber)
Toni Morrison A Mercy (Chatto & Windus)
Gina Ochsner The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight (Portobello Books)
Marilynne Robinson Home (Virago)
Preeta Samarasan Evening is the Whole Day (Fourth Estate)
Kamila Shamsie Burnt Shadows (Bloomsbury)
Curtis Sittenfeld American Wife (Doubleday)
Miriam Toews The Flying Troutmans (Faber)
Ann Weisgarber The Personal History of Rachel DuPree (Macmillan New Writing)
The shortlist for the Orange Prize will be announced on 21st April and the winner will be announced on the 3rd June.
Alas, not us – Yet.
Penguin’s We Tell Stories online fiction site has recently won the prestigious Best of Show award and the award for best experimental site at the South By South West Interactive in Austin, TX (yep, that’s the same as the music and film festivals).
We Tell Stories was (it is still live, but not being updated) a six week project where six writers tell six stories based on six classics and all using new technology. Charles Cumming’s The 21 Steps, for example uses Google Maps and those little information boxes, while Tobby Litt’s Slice is told through two Blogs, one written by the teenage Slice, the other by her parents (I’m not sure it stands up with our own Adorna and Desiderus, however).
It is interesting to read Penguin digital publisher Jeremy Ettinghausen’s blog post about the project and the award as it seems they are going through similar processes that we are with our digital publishing efforts (Flax’s digital anthologies, blog fiction, films and podcasts). While I’m not sure we’ve had the quarter of a milion of hits and thousands of hours of online reading, we have found that the work is well accessed, so we feel that while we got to work with some excellent new talent and play around with some innovative digital work, the real value is the number of people who accessed the work once it was posted.
Personally, of all these forms, I’m still partial to the digital anthologies because you can download them and store them on your desk top, and then dip in when work gets a bit dull. You can create a little bookshelf of great new poetry and fiction along the side of your desktop, and take a flip through them from time to time. Perhaps a little read while uploading a photo to your Gran or waiting for a big print job to finish. Which make s me think, what about the icons…
And on that note I’m off to do some research into changing those little pdf icons into something lovely, but not until I remind you all that Unsaid Undone, the fifth digital anthology with some excellent short stories, will be available from April 2.
Martin the designer
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