Articles tagged "Award"

"CURL UP ON MY LAP. LET ME BRUSH YOUR HAIR WITH MY FINGERS. I AM SINGING YOU A LULLABY. I AM TESTING FOR STRUCTURAL WEAKNESS IN YOUR SKULL."

That's just one threat from Amelia Gray's haunting debut novel, THREATS, which has been longlisted for the 2012 Dylan Thomas Prize!

According to their website the Dylan Thomas Prize is "an international literary award aimed at encouraging raw creative talent worldwide. Established in response to the enormous international phenomenon of new writing by young authors, the Prize recognises the obvious ambitions of those writers as reflected in the marked popularity of creative writing classes."

See the press release and full longlist here.

Congratulations, Amelia! The shortlist will be announced in September; we'll have our fingers crossed until then.

Today we're sharing with you an introduction letter from the 2011 Minotaur/Mystery Writer of America Best First Novel-winning author and librarian, Eleanor Kuhns. Instead of us telling you about her life as a librarian/author and the details of her thrilling new historical mystery, A SIMPLE MURDER, we figured we should leave that up to the expert—her! Without further ado...

Dear Librarians,

Winning the 2011 Minotaur/Mystery Writer of America Best First Novel contest is the culmination of my lifetime dream of becoming a published writer. I wrote my first story when I was ten and by then I was already an avid reader. I wanted then, and still strive, to recreate with my fiction that shock of discovery, that almost life-changing experience of reading a good story. I have never lost that passion for compelling the same response in a reader that I felt as a child.

We're not sure if it was the bizarre cuisine, the epic castles, the mad princes, or the horse-mating videos that caught the attention of the Dolman Travel Book Award committee, but it was something because Simon Winder's GERMANIA just made Dolman's shortlist for 2011 Travel Book of the Year!

Winder writes with a wish to reclaim the brilliant, chaotic, endlessly varied German civilization that the Nazis buried and ruined, and that, since 1945, so many Germans have worked to rebuild.

GERMANIA is an entertaining read covering serious topics---how we are misled by history, how we twist history, and how sometimes it is best to know no history at all. It's about the limits of language, the meaning of culture, and the pleasure of townscape.

Booklist says, "[Winder's] account is loaded with enjoyable digressions on German food, the charm of medieval castles, and German composers. [...] This is an enjoyable, often amusing, often serious effort to understand a people who remain at the center of European civilization."

Kirkus Reviews calls GERMANIA "a cheerful, dryly unserious survey and travelogue through the landscape and psyche of Germany," and says, "[Winder] offers an impressive discussion of the shattering effects of World War I, both on Germany and the world."

The 2011 Dolman Travel Book of the Year will be awarded on the evening of July 6th at Hatchards Bookshop in London.