There was some very strong competition and it’s still a great honour for us to be nominated alongside some wonderful organisations; our shortlisting will provide a brilliant boost of recognition for the project which has gone from strength to strength in the past four years and is one of our most successful partnerships.

Eleanor McCann, Reader-in-Residence at Mersey Care, was at the awards and reported back to us about the evening:

The full list of winners is available on The Guardian’s website. Congratulations to all winners and runners-up.

Running since 1971 (when they were known as the Whitbread Literary Awards), the Costa Book Awards are one of the biggest and most prestigious literary prizes in the UK, recognising a range of the most widely enjoyable books of the year by writers based in the UK and Ireland. The awards are also unique for being the only literary prize which places an equal emphasis on children’s books alongside adult literature.

The Unforgotten Coat has been nominated in the Children’s Book category. The accolade tops off what has been an amazing year for Our Read, with 50,000 copies of the book captivating hundreds of thousands of children (and adults) across the UK – and beyond (we’ve received postcards from Our Read readers as far afield as Spain, Argentina, Australia, Bulgaria and Hong Kong). The Our Read launch day took a special reading train from Liverpool to London and back (with Frank himself on board) and since then, there’s been tons of other events centered around The Unforgotten Coat. We’d like to offer our congratulations to Frank for this honour and thank him for ‘giving’ the book to Our Read – we couldn’t have done it without him.

The category winners will be announced on 4th January 2012. For more information on the awards, visit the Costa Book Awards website.

Although Jane and I were shortlisted, we did not win in the Against All Odds category at the Morgan Foundation Entrepreneur Award ceremony last Thursday night. However we did all have a good night out! You’ve seen the girls all glammed up there (I wouldn’t like to say who the most glamorous was as I’d land myself in a world of bother), so I’ll just say, they all looked a million dollars and the boys were looking a bit dapper too.

We ate lamb, drank champers and learnt a lot about some other great charities and social enterprises in the area. It was a good experience for the people around the table and to be honest the woman who won in our category had been through so much, it would have been a crying shame if she hadn’t won it. Our table gave her a standing ovation.

All I can say is: Morgan Foundation, we’ll be back next year. (Winning, like last year.)

Our work in furthering shared reading in prisons and within the Criminal Justice system is expanding, continuing to make a significant and valuable contribution to the process of rehabilitation and reduction in offending amongst group members. Those who attend Get Into Reading groups in prisons, probation and community initatives have been unanimous about the many postive effects shared reading has on their lives – with one man saying that Get Into Reading provided him with “a second chance”.

The winners and finalists will be announced on Tuesday, November 1st.

For more information about the awards, visit the Lemos&Crane website.

The unfortunate aspect of this year’s shortlist is the nature of the critical response. Obviously, literary critics are never going to completely agree with a list of the six best books of the year and they are entitled to their opinion, but the accusation of dumbing down levelled at this year’s judges is disappointing. What exactly have the judges done to deserve condemnation?

For considering “readability” when naming the nominees.

A worrying perception can be derived from the nature of this debate: ‘high-end’ literature and ‘readable’ books are mutually exclusive. For example, Paradise Lost is considered of great literary quality, but reading it could be an intimidating prospect for some. This does not mean it is not ‘readable’, members of Get Into Reading groups often broaden their literary horizons and read material they may normally have considered too difficult.

On the other side of the coin, the argument implies that a novel with a somewhat linear and relatively easy-to-follow narrative cannot be considered as great literature. Of the list the only one I have read is Pigeon English. This is a thoroughly readable novel, and it is a very touching, affecting story relevant to life in 2011. It is a story told from the perspective of an 11-year-old Ghanaian boy living on an estate in London, who investigates the murder of another boy in the community.

I read the final few pages on a descending plane – a time when a few nerves normally kick in – but I wasn’t taking a bit of notice as I took in the climax of the novel, and then re-read the final couple of pages. It is unsettling to think a beautifully written book reminding me of what it was like to be on the cusp of the teens could be victim of condescension for being readable.

Chair of the 2011 judges, Dame Stella Rimington, made a compelling defence of the shortlist selection following the announcement, summing up the frustration quite perfectly:

All this discussion about readability and dumbing down has been a whole load of nonsense in my opinion. I mean, I did use the word ‘readability’ and I shall stick with it although it’s kind of been kicked over and thrown around, and at the end of the day you have to ask yourself what’s a novel for, if it’s not to be read?

Our entry for the prize was very much focussed on partnership – not just the fact that the Trust and The Reader Organisation are working  together, but the personal partnerships formed between Mersey Care staff and the Readers-in-Residence, as they work together to set up and facilitate reading groups on wards and in day settings.  Trust professionals bring their skills in group work and the positive relationships they have formed with service users, essential to recruiting groups.  The Readers-in-Residence bring literary expertise and the energy that comes from having someone  from ‘outside’ coming on site.

In addition, we concentrated on the outcomes the project has seen:  ‘Improvements in confidence, memory, creativity, listening skills’ as the SURE team noted in their 2008 evaluation of the project.  Or as one service user put it, ‘It’s good because our lives are like stories.’

The Competition has been going since 1991 and is open to all ages, offering prizes totalling £1000 across three categories of adult poetry, adult other writing (stories, essays, lyrics etc) and a children’s section.

Entry to the competition is £2 per item but under-14s can enter for free. The deadline for entries is Monday 28 November.

This years winners will be announced at a special awards event at the Royal Clifton Hotel on Wednesday 7 December (6.30pm –8.30pm). The event is to be hosted by David Lonsdale (Heartbeat, The Royal) with entertainment from poet Kei Miller.

Emma Lloyd, Marketing & Programme Manager says:

The Sefton Writing Competition is an annual event that receives hundreds of entries. Past winners have gone on to write their own material and becomes published authors and poets.

We want to support writing initiatives and will publish the winning entries in the new SEFTON magazine and online.

Tickets are available to those who have entered the competition and can be booked over the phone on 0151 928 1919 and picked up from The Civic, Crosby.

Entry forms can be downloaded from the Sefton Arts website but can also be picked up from Southport Tourist Information Centre, libraries, leisure centres and council outlets across Sefton.

Tickets for all Sefton Celebrates Writing Festival events and workshops are on sale now, just call 0151 928 1919 or go online and book your tickets at www.seftonarts.co.uk.

Patrick McGuinness‘ debut novel, The Last Hundred Days, has been longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize. Set in late 1980s Bucharest, during the violent overthrow of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the thriller follows a young English student as he witnesses the last days of the violent regime. McGuinness’ work has featured in The Reader magazine a few times, with excerpts  from the start of The Last Hundred Days published in the Spring 2010 issue. Ordinarily a poet, he turned to prose form to depict a time and place he experienced first-hand whilst working as a teaching assistant at 19. Infused with the vivid style of a thriller, The Last Hundred Days presents the lives of dissidents and students working against the secret police, and experiencing the destruction of the city around them, in totalitarian Romania.

The Shortlist of six authors will be announced on 6th September with the overall winner being declared on 18th October at London’s Guildhall, and will be broadcast on the BBC. We will be keeping our figures crossed for Patrick!

Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me by Bobby Baker
Grace Williams Says it out Loud by Emma Henderson
The Woman who Thought too Much by Joanne Limburg
The Gossamer Thread: My Life as a Psychotherapist by John Marzillier
What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness by Candia McWilliam
Teach us to Sit Still: A Sceptic’s Search for Health and Healing by Tim Parks
Broken Places by Wendy Perriam
This Party’s Got to Stop by Rupert Thomson

The list above features a mix of novels, art and memoirs, with many coming from writers who suffer from mental health difficulties themselves, or have worked with patients as medical staff.

Brief synopses are available on the Mind website, along with plenty of interesting information and advice from the charity about mental health. With this prize in its 30th year it is clear that this is nothing particularly new, but The Reader Organisation has brought mental health and literature together for some time now,  with our involvement with Mersey Care and other organisations, providing reading groups in areas including acute psychiatric wards and alcohol/drugs detox. The books we read with service users tend to be works of great literature/poetry, but do not always relate directly to mental health. For example, Project Worker Eleanor McCann has recently been reading with her group the cult sci-fi favourite The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

The acknowledgment of works that articulate the experience of undergoing mental health problems is highly commendable, and demonstrates that literature can have the power to help people understand something that may be fairly alien to them. Unfortunately mental illness is a topic that is still associated with numerous stereotypes, and hopefully these books can assist in educating people about psychiatric issues and challenging incorrect pre-conceptions about some of these conditions.

Amongst the books are stories (fictional and factual) of ‘life and love in a mental hospital’; ‘the courage of the human spirit in the face of mental illness’; a memoir of  ‘three brothers [who] take their dad’s old pills and tear the house apart in their bid to confront his sudden death, as well as each other.’ You really need to read about all eight of these books (click on the link above), as each one sounds captivating in its own right.

Maybe you’ve read one or more of the shortlisted books, if so, what did you make of it? What books about mental health have you read and appreciated? Have Mind missed something out? Let us know with a comment below.

Also, Jane Davis will be talking on Radio Scotland’s Book Cafe today (listen again here) about the relationship between reading and mental health.

Director and Marketing Assistant of reading charity body pop at local award ceremony

Last Thursday, in the lovely surroundings of The Isla Gladstone Conservatory The Reader Organisation’s Mersyside Community Theatre project, was  in the running for the Liverpool Mutual Homes (LMH) Unity Award for a Community Organisation. It is with great regret that I inform you that sadly we did not win… however, as you can see in this picture, we did have a dance!

Congratulations to The Princes Trust who won in our category, and to all the other award winners and runners up.