Room To Write and Read is delighted to announce that North East writer, our associate Avril Joy, has been named as the winner of the Costa Short Story Award for her short story Millie and Bird.
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| Avril Joy - winner of the Costa Short Story Award |
Costa Short Story Award - Over 1800 entries were received in this new competition, open to both published and non-published writers, for a single, previously-unpublished short story of up to 4,000 words by an author aged 18 years or over and written in English.
The identities of the winner of the Short Story Award and the two runners-up, together with the overall Costa Book of the Year winner, were announced at the Costa Book Awards ceremony in London on Tuesday, 29th January.
Extract from Millie and Bird by Avril Joy
"It was the kind of summer when the grass grew too long to cut and your toes stubbed at the damp end of your trainers, the summer I was sixteen. It rained all through May and June. It rained on my birthday. It never let up and the weeds in the yard grew taller than the gate post. Jonty Angel, our next-door neighbour, gave Millie the bird that summer, a white zebra finch, and she spent all her time coaxing it onto her shoulder, whispering to it and feeding it titbits. He gave her a cage too and she put it in her bedroom out of harm’s way. It was the summer of Bird, it was the summer I fell in love..."
Hilary Mantel won the overall Costa Book of the Year Award - see Wendy's commentary at the Reviews and Commentariestab
Stop Press:
See 'Reviews and Commentaries' tab above for
Wendy's comment on Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies
Stop Press
And the winner is:-
Madeline Miller
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The Song of Achilles
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The Orange Prize is the most prestigious prize awarded for a novel written by a woman.
Room to Write and Read thought it would be fun to invite all of you to read as many of the shortlist as possible and send reviews which would be posted on this blog. Full details of this year's competition appear below.
We look forward to receiving your contributions and thoughts as to the worthy winner.
The OrangePrize was set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote fiction by women throughout the world to the widest range of readers possible and is awarded for the best novel of the year written by a woman.
Happy Reading!
Orange Prize Shortlist 2012
Esi Edugyan
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Half Blood Blues
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Serpent’s Tail
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Canadian
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2nd Novel
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Anne Enright
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The Forgotten Waltz
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Jonathan Cape
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Irish
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5th Novel
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Georgina Harding
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Painter of Silence
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Bloomsbury
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British
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3rd Novel
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Madeline Miller
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The Song of Achilles
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Bloomsbury
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American
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1st Novel
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Cynthia Ozick
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Foreign Bodies
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Atlantic Books
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American
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7th Novel
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Ann Patchett
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State of Wonder
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Bloomsbury
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American
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6th Novel
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The judges for the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction are:
- Joanna Trollope (Chair), Writer
- Lisa Appignanesi Writer, Novelist and Broadcaster
- Victoria Derbyshire Journalist and Broadcaster
- Natalie Haynes Writer and Broadcaster
- Natasha Kaplinski Broadcaster
“This is a shortlist of remarkable quality and variety,” commented Joanna Trollope, Chair of judges. “It includes six distinctive voices and subjects, four nationalities and an age range of close on half a century. It is a privilege to present it.”
She continues, "My only regret is that the rules of the prize don't permit a longer shortlist. However, I am confident that the fourteen novels we had to leave out will make their own well-deserved way".
The winner will be presented with a cheque for £30,000 and a limited edition bronze statue known as ‘the Bessie’, created by artist Grizel Niven. Both are anonymously endowed.
“The Orange Prize has gone from strength to strength over the years and has established itself as a major international prize," commented Stuart Jackson, Communications Director at Orange. “This is an exceptional shortlist reflecting the diversity and incredible range of female fiction that is available to readers today. Our judges have done a terrific job and will have a tough time choosing just one winner next month from this stellar shortlist of six.”
The award ceremony will take place in The Clore Ballroom, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London, on 30 May 2012.
Previous winners are Téa Obreht for The Tiger’s Wife (2011), Barbara Kingsolver for The Lacuna (2010), Marilynne Robinson for Home (2009), Rose Tremain for The Road Home (2008), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun (2007), Zadie Smith for On Beauty (2006), Lionel Shriver for We Need to Talk About Kevin (2005), Andrea Levy for Small Island (2004), Valerie Martin for Property (2003), Ann Patchett for Bel Canto (2002), Kate Grenville for The Idea of Perfection (2001), Linda Grant for When I Lived in Modern Times (2000), Suzanne Berne for A Crime in the Neighbourhood (1999), Carol Shields for Larry’s Party (1998), Anne Michaels for Fugitive Pieces (1997), and Helen Dunmore for A Spell of Winter (1996).
Orange Prize for Fiction 2012 Dates for the Diary:
- Orange and Grazia writers’ evening at Southbank Centre: 28 May
- Orange Prize Shortlist Readings at Southbank Centre: 29 May
- Orange Prize for Fiction awards ceremony: 30 May
Synopses and Biographies
Esi EdugyanHalf Blood Blues
Serpent’s Tail
The aftermath of the fall of Paris, 1940. Hieronymus Falk, a rising star on the cabaret scene, was arrested in a café and never heard from again. He was twenty years old. He was a German citizen. And he was black.
Fifty years later, Sid, Hiero’s bandmate and the only witness that day, is going back to Berlin. Persuaded by his old friend Chip, Sid discovers there’s more to the journey than he thought when Chip shares a mysterious letter, bringing to the surface secrets buried since Hiero’s fate was settled.
Esi Edugyan is a graduate of the University of Victoria and John Hopkins University. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Best New American Voices 2003. Her debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, written when she was 25, was published internationally. Half Blood Blues was shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize and won the Scotiabank Giller Prize 2011. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
The judges said: “We were all struck by the sustained and powerful voice, and sense of place and period, in this wonderful novel of jazz, war-torn Europe, and remorse.”
Anne Enright
The Forgotten Waltz
Jonathan Cape
The Forgotten Waltz is a memory of desire: a recollection of the bewildering speed of attraction, the irreparable slip into longing. In Terenure, a pleasant suburb of Dublin, in the winter of 2009, it has snowed. Gina Moynihan, girl about town, recalls the trail of lust and happenstance that brought her to fall for ‘the love of her life’, Seán Vallely. As the city outside comes to a halt, Gina remembers the days of their affair in one hotel room or another: long afternoons made blank by bliss and denial. Now, as the silent streets and the stillness and vertigo of the falling snow make the day luminous and full of possibility, Gina walks through the weather to meet a girl she calls his ‘beautiful mistake’: Seán’s fragile, twelve-year-old daughter, Evie.
Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published two volumes of stories, collected as Yesterday’s Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and four novels, most recently The Gathering, which was the Irish Novel of the Year and won the Irish Fiction Award and the 2007 Man Booker Prize.
The judges said: “What an achievement, we all thought — a flawed heroine, a modern tale of unromantic adultery and conflicted parental loyalties, and a compelling, believable, lyrical read.”
Georgina Harding
Painter of Silence
Bloomsbury
Iasi, Romania, the early 1950s. A man is found on the steps of hospital, frail as a fallen bird. He carries no identification and utters no words, and it is days before anyone discovers that he is deaf and mute. And then a young nurse called Safta brings paper and pencils with which he can draw. Slowly, painstakingly, memories appear on the page: a hillside, a stable, a car, a country house, dogs and mirrored rooms and samovars in what is now a lost world.
The memories are Safta’s also. For the man is Augustin, son of the cook at the manor at Poiana that was her family home. Born six months apart, they grew up with a connection that bypassed words. But while Augustin’s world remained the same size, Safta’s expanded to embrace languages, society — and love, as Augustin watched one long hot summer, in the form of a fleeting young man in a green Lagonda.
Safta left before the war, Augustin stayed. But even in the wide hills and valleys around Poiana he did not escape its horrors. He watched uncomprehending as armies passed through the place. Then the Communists came, and he found himself their unlikely victim. There are many things that he must tell Safta that may be more than simple drawings can convey.
Georgina Harding is the author of two novels: The Solitude of Thomas Cave and The Spy Game, a BBC Book at Bedtime and shortlisted for the Encore Award. Her first book was a work of non-fiction, In Another Europe, recording a journey she made across Romania by motorbike in 1988 during the worst times of the Ceausescu regime. It was followed by Tranquebar: A Season in South India, which documented the lives of the people in a small fishing village on the Coromandel coast. Georgina Harding lives in London and on a farm in the Stour Valley, Essex.
The judges said: “We were impressed by this deceptively quiet book, which grows in effect and strength as it goes on, portraying a deep understanding of unconventional ways of self-expression, and of relationships. The writing is beautiful.”
Madeline Miller
The Song of Achilles
Bloomsbury
Greece in the age of Heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to Phthia to live in the shadow of King Peleus and his strong, beautiful son, Achilles. By all rights their paths should never cross, but Achilles takes the shamed prince as his friend, and as they grow into young men skilled in the arts of war and medicine, their bond blossoms into something far deeper — despite the displeasure of Achilles’s mother Thetis, a cruel sea goddess. But then word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped. Torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus journeys with Achilles to Troy, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they hold dear.
Madeline Miller was born in Boston, MA, and grew up in both New York City and Philadelphia. She attended Brown University, where she graduated magna cum laude with a BA and MA in Classics. She has also studied at the Yale School of Drama specialising in adapting classical tales to a modern audience. Since graduation she has taught Latin, Greek and Shakespeare, both at her high school, The Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, PA, and elsewhere. Madeline began writing fiction when she was in high school, and has been working on The Song of Achilles, her first novel, for the last ten years. She currently lives in New England, where she teaches Latin and writes.
The judges said: “Terrific. The Trojan Wars and the legendary love story of Patroclus and Achilles told with all the intensity and accuracy that this world of violence and superstition and romance deserves.”
Cynthia Ozick
Foreign Bodies
Atlantic Books
The collapse of her brief marriage has stalled Bea Nightingale’s life, leaving her middle-aged and alone, teaching in an impoverished borough of 1950s New York. A plea from her estranged brother gives Bea the excuse to escape lassitude by leaving for Paris to retrieve a nephew she barely knows; but the siren call of Europe threatens to deafen Bea to the dangers of entangling herself in the lives of her brother’s family.
Travelling from America to France, Bea leaves the stigma of divorce on the far side of the Atlantic; newly liberated, she chooses to defend her nephew and his girlfriend Lili by waging a war of letters on the brother she has promised to help. But Bea’s generosity is a mixed blessing: those she tries to help seem to be harmed, and as Bea’s family unravels around her, she finds herself once again drawn to the husband she thought she had left in the past.
Cynthia Ozick's novels, essays, and short stories have won numerous prizes and awards, among them the Presidential Medal for the Humanities and the PEN-Nabokov Award for Lifetime Achievement. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Man-Booker International Prize, and her fiction has garnered four O. Henry First Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the PEN-Malamud Award for the Short Story, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for the Essay. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she lives in Westchester County, New York, with her husband.
The judges said: “This novel is so fresh, and so sophisticated, in its clear eyed look at family dynamics, and so exquisitely written — we were charmed by it.”
Ann Patchett
State of Wonder
Bloomsbury
Among the tangled waterways and giant anacondas of the Brazilian Rio Negro, an enigmatic scientist is developing a drug that could alter the lives of women forever. Dr Annick Swenson’s work is shrouded in mystery; she refuses to report on her progress, especially to her investor’s, whose patience is fast running out. Anders Eckman, a mild-mannered lab researcher, is sent to investigate. A curt letter reporting his untimely death is all that returns.
Now Marina Singh, Anders’s colleague and once a student of the mighty Dr Swenson, is their last hope. Compelled by pleas of Anders’s wife, who refuses to accept that her husband is not coming home, Marina leaves the snowy plains of Minnesota and retraces her friend’s steps into the heart of the South American darkness, determined to track down Dr Swenson and uncover the secrets being jealously guarded among the remotest tribes of the rainforest.
What Marina does not yet know is that, in this ancient corner of the jungle, where the muddy waters and susurrating grasses hide countless unknown perils and temptations, she will face challenges beyond her wildest imagination. Marina is no longer the student, but only time will tell if she has learnt enough.
Ann Patchett is the author of five previous novels, including Bel Canto, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction. She is also the author of two works of nonfiction; What Now? and the bestselling Truth & Beauty. She writes for the New York Times Magazine, Elle, GQ, Financial Times, Paris Review and Vogue. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee where she has her own independent bookshop. In April 2012, Ann Patchett was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.
The judges said: “An extraordinary novel of science and adventure handled with equally extraordinary grace and lightness and wit.”
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