Over the years, my dearios, I have, it would seem, gained sufficient esteem over various fields with no particular association with one another that I have been asked to be on panels adjudicating awards. (Will concede that there was nothing there approximating e.g. the Nobel or the Booker.)

(I am still wondering what happened to the one that made, ( Read more... )

Well, yay for the British Academy, what: Historian David Olusoga awarded President’s Medal: The writer and broadcaster has brought diverse stories from Britain’s past to a wider audience: Olusoga, a writer, broadcaster and film-maker, best known as the author of Black and British: A Forgotten History, is the 39th person to be given the President’s ( Read more... )

(Actually, for reasons given, I don't think this quite reaches an apogee of the Hardyesque, but still).
Came across this, cited as a supporting example in a discussion of the early C20th literary culture of making awards and giving dinners to literary figures.
The Royal Society of Literature awarded Thomas Hardy its Gold Medal on the occasion of ( Read more... )

Bad sex award cancelled as public exposed to ‘too many bad things in 2020’
However, if you're really missing the dreadful ways in which some novelists write about Ye Carnale Acte, Literary Review Twitter is tweeting selections from former years.
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I am not sure if this counts as Bad Sex, weird writing about the topic, a weird topic to begin with ( Read more... )

A thing that has been popping up a lot this week across various things - books I've been reading, threads on Twitter, papers at the symposium yesterday - has been that thing about the valuing of Works of Art in various fields for doing things which are visibly technically difficult or remarkable, or demand Effort from the person engaging with the ( Read more... )

I am very much 'you GO, girl' to Celia Paul: Much of the narrative in this book circles around her turbulent relationship with Lucian Freud. After his death, she noticed mentions of herself in his obituaries, as well as articles and books, and became determined to tell her own story. No longer wanting to remain simply a part of Freud’s story, she ( Read more... )

Judges admit this year's Bad sex award entries are 'quite good', conceding that '2017’s sex scenes have been rather well done'.
I was intrigued to note that 'Organisers said that the prize was not intended to cover expressly pornographic literature', which rather made me wonder if one of the problems with the books being nominated for the Bad Sex ( Read more... )

Choosing a Book in the Twenty-First Century.
I do not think it is a function of being old and jaded that I was going WHAT? NO! at this: Most bookworms know that it is almost impossible to walk into a bookshop without wanting to buy every single one because the thought of missing out on any of them is almost unbearable.
Or maybe the writer is the ( Read more... )

The London Review of Books Bookshop Blog: The [Hypothetical] Booker Prize Winners, 1900-1968.
And I think, firstly, that if you are judging by present-day Booker criteria, how often, if ever, have you seen books that are funny, or genre, making the cut even on to the short list? I yield to none in my admiration for works such as The Pursuit of Love ( Read more... )

The annual Bad Sex Award has been made; I wonder if the contenders had read this How to write good sex scenes and taken it as a how-to manual. This, Rude awakening: three essential rules for writing good sex, appears more seriously intended, but I'm fairly sure that the Six and Sixty Ways applies to sex-writing as to other genres.
Okay, I can see ( Read more... )