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Posts Tagged ‘Bloomsbury’

Cristin Terrill, who took part in the first LWW Novelists’ Club in 2010 has her first novel for young adults coming out in 2013. It will be published on Aug 1 in the UK (Bloomsbury)  and in the autumn in the US (Disney-Hyperion).  It’s described as “A brilliantly brain-warping thriller and a love story that leaps back and forth in time – All Our Yesterdays is an amazing first novel, perfect for fans of The Hunger Games.” Click here to pre-order it on Amazon.

Cristin’s email says:  “Yours was the first creative writing class/critique group I was ever a part of, and it was definitely a big confidence builder for me, so thank you!”

Also one of the six participant on the same course was Annemarie Neary. Her novel A Parachute in the Lime Tree came out in the UK and Ireland last year. ‘Tense, edgy, beautifully written. I wouldn’t be surprised if it got nominated for a handful of prizes’  (Books Monthly, UK). Click here to buy Annemarie’s book.

Other people connected to London Writing Workshops have books out this year. Lane Ashfeldt, who talked us through the mysteries of crowd-funding at the seminar ‘Going Digital’, has now brought out her collection of short stories  Saltwater.  ‘Raw and elegant’ (Bookmunch),  ‘A gorgeous collection by a bright talent,’ (writer and poet Nuala Ní Chonchúir). Click here to buy Lane’s book or for the Kindle version, click here.

Also at ‘Going Digital’, Jane Rusbridge, talked about using social media to publicise her second novel Rook, voted Guardian Readers’ Book of the Year, and described by the TLS as: ‘A mesmerising story of family […] which brings to life the shifting Sussex sands and the rich seam of history lying just beneath them’.  Click here to order Rook.

Jaqueline Jacques who attended the event has a novel out from Honno this year: The Colours of Corruption.  ‘A Victorian murder mystery with a strong and interesting central character, a police artist. A nice one’  says the review in The Bookseller. Click here to buy Jacqueline’s book.

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The Bookseller reports that  Bloomsbury is to launch a new imprint called Bloomsbury Circus. The new  list  will be a mix of debuts and more established names:  “mostly fiction, unashamedly literary, always fresh and sometimes surprising”. In the first year there will be  nine titles, and after that  they will build up to publishing four books a month.

Alexandra Pringle, Bloomsbury’s editor-in-chief, is quoted as saying: “With fiction, you can’t successfully publish more than four titles a month because, selling into the fiction buyer, you have to have your lead, second lead, dark horse and a crime title. If you do more, you lose the focus. If we are going to grow, we have to do it in an exciting, imaginative way. This is a way we can grow, and continue to offer the service we do.”

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One of the books on this year’s Guardian First Book Award shortlist is from a brand new not-for-private-profit publisher, And Other Stories, established in 2010 with funding from the Arts Council. Down the Rabbit Hole, by Juan Pablo Villalobos (pictured left), is a darkly comic novel about Latin-American drug-dealers. The other titles vying for the £10,000 prize are Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English (Bloomsbury), which was also shortlisted for this year’s Booker; Amy Waldman’s The Submission (William Heinemann), a novel about the tensions arising around the building of a 9/11 memorial; Kashmiri author Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator (Viking); and – the only non-fiction book to make the shortlist this year – American cancer specialist Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies (Fourth Estate), a biography of the disease. You can read extracts of all the books with introductions by the authors on the Guardian website.

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Next week is the closing date for  a prize for unpublished writers that is beginning to develop quite a reputation for launching careers. Roshi Fernando, whose novel Homesick won the Impress Prize For New Writers in 2009, will now be published by Bloomsbury in the UK and Commonwealth, and in the US by Knopf, an imprint of Random House. Ginny Baily’s debut novel Africa Junction, which was shortlisted for the Impress Prize in 2007, has been published in 2011 by the Random House imprint Harvill Secker.

Roshi Fernando was also shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award this year.

More information about entering the prize here: Impress Prize

Three debut novels are on the 16th Orange Prize shortlist, which was announced this morning (11th April) at the London Book Fair. They are ‘Grace Williams Says It Loud’  by Emma Henderson (Sceptre), ‘The Tiger’s Wife’ by Tea Obreht (Weidenfeld & Nicholson) and ‘Annabel’ by Canadian author Kathleen Winter (Jonathan Cape). The other shortlisted titles are ‘Room’ by Emma Donoghue (Picador), ‘Great House’ by Nicole Krauss (Viking) and Aminatta Forna’s ‘The Memory of Love’ (Bloomsbury). The winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced on June 8th.

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The Short  Review has news of the Edge Hill Prize – the UK’s only literary award for published collections of short stories. Titles on the longlist reveal an intriguing mix of major publishers such as Penguin, Random House and Bloomsbury, and very small independents like Tindal Street, Impress Books and Salt (the latter has just been told it has lost its Arts Council funding). The shortlist will be announced in May. Click on any of the titles in orange to go to the Short Review website for the review of that particular book.

Edge Hill Longlist:

• Martin Bax – Memoirs of a Gone World (Salt Publishing).
• Alan Beard – You Don’t Have to Say (Tindal Street Press).
• Peter Bromley – Sky Light and Other Stories (Biscuit).
• Jo Cannon – Insignificant Gestures (Pewter Rose Press).
• Roshi Fernando – Homesick (Impress Books).
• David Gaffney – The Half-life of Songs (Salt Publishing).
• Vanessa Gebbie – Storm Warning, Echoes of Conflict (Salt Publishing).review coming soon
• James Kelman – If it is Your Life (Penguin).
• Andre Mangeot – True North (Salt Publishing). review coming soon
• Jay Merill – God of the Pigeons (Salt Publishing).
• Magnus Mills – Screwtop Thompson (Bloomsbury).
• Graham Mort – Touch (Seren).
• Nik Perring – Not So Perfect (Roast Books).
• Susannah Rickards – Hot Kitchen Snow (Salt Publishing). review coming soon
• Michele Roberts – Mud, Stories and Sex and Love (Virago).
• Polly Samson – Perfect Lives (Virago). review coming soon
• Helen Simpson – Inflight Entertainment (Random House).
• Fiona Thackeray – The Secret’s in the Folding (Pewter Rose Press).
• Tom Vowler – The Method and Other Stories (Salt Publishing).
• Susie Wild – The Art of Contraception (Parthian).

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One of the many interesting snippets of information on the Guardian‘s new website dedicated to Children’s Fiction is the news that Bloomsbury is offering £75 worth of children’s books to the best short story written by anyone between the ages of ten and 16  – but it can’t be longer than 247 words.  More details here: Guardian Children’s Books.