Category Archives: News

Luke Kennard wins Forward poetry prize

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Luke Kennard’s Notes on the Sonnets, a collection of prose poems responding to Shakespeare’s sonnets, won the Forward prize for best collection, beating other nominees in a competition judged by poet Shivanee Ramlochan.

Kennard said he started writing Sonnet 66 at a party and then got hooked on writing reactions to all 154 Sonnets.

Caleb Femi won the prize for best first collection for his work Poor, which explores the lives and times of a Peckham estate.

Femi’s debut book grabbed the judges from the first page. Nicole Sealey won the Forward prize for best single poem for Pages 22-29, an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure.

Ramlochan praised the poem, saying that it shows there are poems embedded in all sorts of documents, and the jury said the poems showed how the poetic imagination can be bold, limitless, and reach deep into our lives.

Abdulrazak Gurnah Awarded Nobel Prize

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Abdulrazak Gurnah has been awarded The Nobel prize in literature for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”

A native of Zanzibar, Gurnah fled persecution and emigrated to England in the 1960s to study. His books include 10 novels and many short stories. Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee, noted that Gurnah’s novels “recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world.”

The prize hasn’t been awarded to a black African author since 1986, when Wole Soyinka won. He is the first black writer since Toni Morrison in 1993 to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

Gurnah’s fourth novel, Paradise, was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker prize. 2001 saw his sixth novel, By the Sea, longlisted for the prize. Olsson said that Paradise “has obvious reference to Joseph Conrad in its portrayal of the innocent young hero Yusuf’s journey to the heart of darkness.”

“[Gurnah] has consistently and with great compassion penetrated the effects of colonialism in East Africa, and its effects on the lives of uprooted and migrating individuals,” Olsson told reporters in Stockholm. Gurnah said he believed it was a set-up when he was told of his victory in his kitchen.

“I thought it was a prank,” he said. “These things are usually floated for weeks beforehand, or sometimes months beforehand, about who are the runners, so it was not something that was in my mind at all. I was just thinking, I wonder who’ll get it?”

“I am honoured to be awarded this prize and to join the writers who have preceded me on this list. It is overwhelming and I am so proud.”

He has never before received due recognition for his work, according to his longtime editor at Bloomsbury, Alexandra Pringle.

“He is one of the greatest living African writers, and no one has ever taken any notice of him and it’s just killed me. I did a podcast last week and in it I said that he was one of the people that has been just ignored. And now this has happened,” she said.

In explaining Gurnah’s work, Pringle said it’s always dealt with displacement, “but in the most beautiful and haunting ways of what it is that uproots people and blows them across continents.”

“It’s not always asylum seeking, it can be so many reasons, it can be trade, it can be commerce, it can be education, it can be love,” she said. “The first of his novels I took on at Bloomsbury is called By the Sea, and there’s this haunting image of a man at Heathrow airport with a carved incense box, and that’s all he has. He arrives, and he says one word, and that’s ‘asylum.’”

“In Gurnah’s literary universe, everything is shifting – memories, names, identities. This is probably because his project cannot reach completion in any definitive sense,” said Olsson. “An unending exploration driven by intellectual passion is present in all his books, and equally prominent now, in Afterlives, as when he began writing as a 21-year-old refugee.”

In 2017, after criticism regarding financial misconduct and sexual abuse, the Swedish Academy made steps to become more transparent in deciding the Nobel Prize. After the uproar generated by Peter Handke’s win in 2019, the American poet Louise Glück won the prize last year, a decision that wasn’t subject to controversy.

Who doesn’t read books in America?

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According to a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted from January – February 2015, 23 percent of U.S. adults did not read a book that year. Exactly who are these non-book readers?

According to a survey, non-book readers tend to share several demographic traits. A much higher percentage of adults with a high school diploma or less said they have never read a book (39% vs. 11%). Also, lower-educated adults are less likely to own smartphones, the most popular device for reading electronic books.

People with household incomes below $30k are less likely to read books (31% vs. 15%). Hispanics (38%) are more likely than Blacks (25%) or Whites (20%) not to have read a book in the last year. Survey samples of Asian Americans were too small for statistically valid analyses.

Also, there are differences based on age and community. The non-book reading rate is greater among older Americans than it is among younger Americans. Gender does not seem to be a relevant factor.

The demographic profile of people who have never been to a library is similar to non-book readers. A survey conducted by the Center for Community Development in 2016 found that those without a high school diploma were more likely to have never been to a public library.

Stratford expert turns down Boris Johnson’s plea for help with Shakespeare book

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A leading Shakespearean expert in Stratford-upon-Avon has turned down a request to help Boris Johnson write his book on the Bard. The prime minister allegedly was working on The Riddle of Genius instead of attending Cobra (Civil Contingencies Committee) meetings.

Mr Johnson’s literary agent allegedly asked a Shakespeare expert to semi-dictate the content of the book to Mr. Johnson. The Churchill Factor, a recent book penned by Mr Johnson, was written in collaboration with his former research assistant Warren Dockter.

Stephen Greenblatt, author of Will in the Wolrld: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, has not been approached to help with Johnson’s book. He said, “I haven’t been approached and do not know who might have been. Have you tried Jim Shapiro at Columbia? If I were the PM, I might ask him.”

Stephen King’s print-only book is now a pirated ebook

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Stephen King’s latest novel, Joyland, was supposed to be published in a print-only edition by Hard Case Crime. The move was roundly applauded because it demonstrated some real faith in traditional print publishing. It was also a savvy business decision driving sales sky-high.

But as soon as it was released in paper, the book popped up online as a pirated ebook. In response, Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai had a few things to say about it in an interview with Jason Boog at AppNewser:

“We’ve seen dozens of websites over the past year purporting to offer pirated downloadable copies of JOYLAND, and so far they’ve all been frauds – if you try to download the file, you get malware or a virus instead. But inevitably the book will eventually be pirated for real, just as every best-selling book and popular movie or TV show or piece of music is. As a publisher, you try to prevent it or to stamp it out when you discover it, but it’s like the “war on drugs” – good luck. Seize a boatload of heroin, and what does it get you? There are more boats, there’s more heroin. . . . In the end you have to rely on the good behavior of the vast majority of the audience – I see no reason to think that pirates represent more than a small fraction of all consumers. That doesn’t mean we don’t care about piracy – we do. But it’s just one of the many punches you have to learn to roll with in the rough-and-tumble world of modern publishing.”

It’s hard to see though how some pirated copies have actually slowed Joyland‘s meteoric rise up the bestseller charts. The book is currently the number one selling book on Amazon and has been in the Amazon Best Sellers Top 100 for the last two months.

Of course this feat is not likely to be replicated by many other writers. As everyone in the publishing business knows, people buy authors, not books. And the King brand name, along with a splashy publicity campaign, created a momentum guaranteeing massive sales. I don’t think King is losing sleep over these pirated copies, unless he’s thinking of using the idea in yet another novel.

Shakespeare’s Curtain Theatre unearthed in London

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The Museum of London said Wednesday that an archaeological dig had uncovered part of the gravel yard and gallery walls of the 435-year-old Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch. The site is situated behind a pub on a site marked for redevelopment just east of London’s business district.

The remains are of a polygonal structure, typical of 16th-century theaters. It is believed to be the venue immortalized as “this wooden O” in the prologue to “Henry V.” The Curtain opened in 1577 and was home to Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, from 1597-1599, until the players moved to the Globe Theatre across the Thames.

Among the plays premiered at the Curtain were the Bard’s “Henry V” and possibly “Romeo and Juliet,” as well as Ben Jonson’s “Every Man in His Humour.” Shakespeare and his troupe moved to the Curtain after a dust-up with the landlord of their previous venue, known simply as The Theater.

The troupe’s experience at the Curtain was not a happy one, according to Patrick Spottiswoode, director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe. The venue staged sword fights, acrobatics, and bear-baiting — in addition to plays — and attracted a rough, demanding audience. “It was a different kind of house and they were probably desperate to leave,” Spottiswoode said. “Crowds would flock to The Curtain to see all sorts of activities — they didn’t go there to see thesps.”

The Lord Chamberlain’s Men abandoned the site in 1599 for the Globe, the theater they’d built using timbers smuggled from the original Theatre and pushed across the frozen Thames on large sleds. The Curtain survived at least until the 1620s, which makes it the longest-lived of London’s Elizabethan playhouses.

The real estate company redeveloping the site said it plans to preserve the site.
The Theater and the Curtain were London’s first successful playhouses — before then, plays were staged in inn yards and various makeshift spaces. Elizabethan playhouses were built outside the city walls, making them free from regulation by civic leaders, who were hostile to theaters and other disreputable forms of entertainment.

Despite recent discoveries, there is still much to learn about the Elizabethan theater. According to Heather Knight, a senior Museum of London archaeologist, “The late 16th century was a time of a theatrical arms race in London. The proprietors of these building were making improvements to attract customers. So to have the chance to look at the earliest of these buildings (The Theater), and the one that had the longest life is a real opportunity.”