The Prize honors its shortlist finalists and annual winner for published work in the broad range of literary forms in which Dylan Thomas excelled, including poetry, prose, fictional drama, short story collections, novels, novellas, stage plays and screenplays.

The official launch of the 2010 Prize will take place this year at a ceremony and reception hosted at the British Consulate-General in Boston on March 1. Special guests and speakers will include Harvard Review Editor Christina Thompson, Tessa Dahl and former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky.

Entries for the competition must be submitted by the publisher, editor, literary agent, or in the case of produced film scripts and stage plays, by the producer. Writers must be 18-30 years old, and the literary works must have been published within the past year to be eligible for competition.

Submission deadline is April 30, 2010.

Andrea Gillies’s book Keeper: Living with Nancy – a journey into Alzheimer’s (Short Books) – describes the author’s decision to take on the full-time care of her mother-in-law, an Alzheimer’s sufferer and beat a shortlist of five other books to win the £25,000 prize.

Read more about the Wellcome Trust Book Prize here.

In an article written in today’s Guardian, Dasgupta has confessed that he found his victory “very depressing”:

“I had loads of people emailing me, asking ‘Can I post this to the discussion?’,” he says. “A lot of people were immensely irate about the whole thing – I was amazed by the passion it raised. I was mostly saying ‘Please don’t post anything’.” A user with the postername John Self posted an invitation Dasgupta had sent via Facebook for friends to come and vote on the Not the Booker thread, and at that point “anything that was said about my book was a conspiracy,” Dasgupta continues, “and people were saying that I was behind it all.” It reached a point where Dasgupta felt there was “no way of arguing with any of this”, and posted on the thread himself to withdraw from the competition.

Set in the same dystopian world as her previous novel Oryx and Crake, it tells the story of God’s Gardeners – a religion devoted to the preservation of all species. The Gardeners have long predicted the Waterless Flood, which arrives in the form of a global pandemic obliterating most of human life. The survivors are left to battle over an existence amongst themselves and the other gene-spliced life forms now running amok – will the human race make it, and more to the point, should it?

The event, a unique literary performance with music, is part of a selective UK tour to support the work of the RSPB & BirdLife International, and to raise awareness of species decline.

The event will take place at Manchester Cathedral on Tuesday 1st September at 7.30pm. Tickets priced £8/£6 concessions are now on sale and can be booked through the box office on 0870 428 0785 or online, following this link.

Lowell won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1926 for her volume entitled What’s O’clock? (1925).

The most striking aspect of this poem is the emphasis on the visual: the precise descriptions of the sun shining on the ‘books’, ‘scissors’ and ‘thimble’ lying exactly where they were left, contrasted with the unexplained absence of the ‘you’ to whom the poem is addressed. Though Lowell does not present us with the person’s physical description, their absence is very keenly felt throughout the poem, mainly due to the effect they have on the speaker themselves: ‘Suddenly I am lonely’. The swiftness with which this mysterious, absent person is able to impact upon the speaker makes the relationship between the two an extremely compelling one to encounter: the urgency of the speaker’s desire to be reunited with the absent person is resolved by the second stanza, and we are able to see just how profoundly the poem’s speaker is affected by the presence of the so-far absent ‘you’: ‘I look at you, heart of silver [...] And I long to kneel instantly at your feet’. The poem’s movement from the domestic into religious vision is another effective technique of Lowell’s: the poem’s title, as well as images of the ‘Canterbury bells’, emphasises the extent to which both the absence and physical presence of ‘you’ stirs the emotions and reactions of the narrator.

Madonna of the Evening Flowers

All day long I have been working
Now I am tired.
I call: “Where are you?”
But there is only the oak tree rustling in the wind.
The house is very quiet,
The sun shines in on your books,
On your scissors and thimble just put down,
But you are not there.
Suddenly I am lonely:
Where are you?
I go about searching.
 
Then I see you,
Standing under a spire of pale blue larkspur,
With a basket of roses on your arm.
You are cool, like silver,
And you smile.
I think the Canterbury bells are playing little tunes,
You tell me that the peonies need spraying,
That the columbines have overrun all bounds,
That the pyrus japonica should be cut back and rounded.
You tell me these things.
But I look at you, heart of silver,
White heart-flame of polished silver,
Burning beneath the blue steeples of the larkspur,
And I long to kneel instantly at your feet,
While all about us peal the loud, sweet Te Deums of the Canterbury bells.

Amy Lowell, 1919.

If you liked this, here’s a link back to another of Amy Lowell’s poems: The Pike

This announcement follows the publication of Duffy’s first official poem as Laureate: ‘Politics’, which sees her join the government expenses row. You can view the poem here, or for more information on reactions to ‘Politics’ follow this link to the Guardian article.

The Festival brochure will be distributed across Merseyside and Lancashire from Monday 22nd June. More details will be available shortly, but for now visit the official website for more information.

Browne states that one of his main aims as Children’s Laureate will be:

to raise the profile of, and respect and enthusiasm for, picture books

Browne has written and illustrated almost forty titles and, of these, it is The Shape Game that will be central to his campaign promoting picture books: a story based on a childhood game involving drawing.

I didn’t want to make Jack a good man in a conventional sense, I wanted to make him a person of value in terms of the whole complexity of his life.

On the decision to award Robinson the prize, Fi Glover, Chairman of the judging panel says:

We were unanimously agreed – it is a profound work of art

See which other novels were short-listed here.

The Reader No.32 featured an extract from Home, and you can find details on how to get hold of a copy here.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (Atlantic)

Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold (Tindal Street Press)

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry (Faber and Faber)

From A to X by John Berger (Verso)

The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser (Chatto & Windus)

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh (John Murray)

The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant (Virago)

A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif

The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher (Fourth Estate)

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill (Fourth Estate)

The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape)

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith (Simon & Schuster)

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz (Hamish Hamilton

Michael Portillo, chair of judges, comments:

The judges are pleased with the geographical balance of the longlist with writers from Pakistan, India, Australia, Ireland and UK. We also are happy with the interesting mix of books, five first novels and two novels by former winners. The list covers an extraordinary variety of writing. Still two qualities emerge this year: large scale narrative and the striking use of humour.

With five first novels, the list this year has passed over many of the big names in the literary world, shining a light instead for small presses, humour and horror with an eclectic selection of titles. The big runners that were expected – Damon Galgut, Tim Winton, Peter Carey, for example – have been left out of the 2008 race. I am sure that Salmon Rushdie and Amitav Gosh are able to carry the torch for the established literary world though. So, I guess it’s time to stop musing on the list and start reading through it.

The shortlist will be announced on Tuesday 9th September.

Posted by Jen Tomkins