Wales Book of the Year
Wales Book of the Year prizes are awarded annually to the best Welsh and English language works in the fields of fiction and literary criticism by Welsh or Welsh interest authors. Established in 1992, the awards are currently administered by the Academi, and supported by the Arts Council of Wales, Welsh Assembly Government and the Welsh Books Council.
The longlist of ten works in each language is published in April and the shortlist of three works in each language at the Hay Festival in May. The winners are announced in June. Since 2006, the winners have each received £10,000. From 2007, four runners-up (two in each language) also each receive £1000. In 2009, Media Wales sponsored a voted “People’s Choice” award for the English-language works.
The 2010 18th Wales Book of the Year longlist
From the tales of the Mabinogi to an account of a rural Welsh childhood in the 1920s and the diary of a modern-day police officer on the beat, the longlist for the Wales Book of the Year features an eclectic mix of subject matter and genres.
The longlists for the eighteenth Wales Book of the Year – Wales’s premier award for literature – were announced today, Tuesday 20 April at The Management Centre, Bangor Business School, North Wales. The awards, worth £10,000 to the winners, are presented to the best books of the year in the English and Welsh language.
The English language judges are poet and lecturer at the University of Wales, Ian Gregson (chair); fiction writer, James Hawes and broadcaster Sara Edwards.
The list includes debut novels from Mike Thomas and Terri Wiltshire; Alun Trevor’s memoir of a Welsh childhood; travel writing by Horatio Clare; short stories from Emyr Humphreys and poetry from Jasmine Donahaye, Philip Gross and Richard Marggraf Turley. Peter Lord is nominated for his scholarly account of the history of Welsh painting and Nikolai Tolstoy for his analysis of the origins of the Mabinogi.
On Sunday 6 June, the shortlist of three books in each language will be announced at the Guardian Hay Festival. The winners will be announced on Wednesday 30 June at a gala dinner at St David’s Hotel, Cardiff where the winners in each language will receive a cheque for £10,000 and four runners-up will each receive £1,000.
Pocket Notebook by Mike Thomas
Pocket Notebook by Mike Thomas
Meet Jacob Smith. Your good-old British policeman. The sort revered around the world. But Jacob’s no ordinary ‘tit-wearing’ beat bobby. He’s a tactical firearms officer – a handsome, popular, financially secure specialist, no less. He’s also married, with two children; a connoisseur of fine cinema, who also enjoys the occasional hit from his expansive collection of do-it-yourself ‘art’ DVDs (the latest of which was ‘borrowed’ from a flat during a drugs warrant); an amateur historian, with a keen interest in the Vietnam War. And he does like to keep himself in shape, hence the rather large steroid habit – and the even larger amount of money he owes to his dealer. And did we mention he’s partial to women’s feet? That the local shoe shop is his lap-dance palace? And the girlfriend, his little Christmas treat to himself, who’s desperately trying to shrug him off now it’s the New Year? Or what about his parents – do we really need to go there? And now his family and friends are starting to worry about our Jake …and his police superiors are increasingly taking notice of the way he conducts himself. As you can see, Jake’s a very busy boy. And his life is about to get a lot more complicated…”Pocket Notebook” is the debut novel from serving police officer Mike Thomas. An angry black comedy, it follows Jacob’s very public breakdown and subsequent fall from grace, all of which he meticulously records in his police notebook.
Carry Me Home by Terri Wiltshire
Carry Me Home by Terri Wiltshire
Lander, Alabama, 1904. When young Emma Scott claims she has been raped by a ‘black hobo’, a chain of events is triggered that will affect generations to come.
In modern-day Lander, Canaan Phillips has fled her abusive husband and returned to Lander and her fierce Southern Baptist grandmother, who brought her up after her mother’s suicide. Canaan’s one friend during her childhood was her grandmother’s simple brother, Luke. Now frail and elderly, Luke is still living in the corncrib shack that has been his home for thirty years.
In early-twentieth-century Lander, Emma Scott has taken an instant and violent dislike to her new child – a white-skinned boy named Luke. Abused and neglected, Luke eventually befriends Squeaky, a black boy whose family farms nearby. When tragedy strikes, Luke takes to the railroad, and as he enters manhood on the rails, we begin to discover the truth behind the events that led to his birth.
In the twentieth century, Canaan, too, is slowly coming to terms with her painful past. And, with the help of her adored Uncle Luke, she is learning to love again.
This is a heart-rending and luminous story about loyalty, hardship, love and friendship. It is also a reminder that goodness can prevail even through the cruellest hardships.
The Songbird Is Singing by Alun Trevor
The Songbird Is Singing by Alun Trevor
Based on the life of the author’s father, this narrative follows the famous Welsh tenor Jabez Trevor as he tours North America with the Welsh Imperial Singers. The story is recalled by the 80-year-old Arthur as he reminiscences with his brother, Alun, about their childhood. They eagerly awaited news from their father’s trips, enthusiastically reading about the 1920s and airships, prohibition, Al Capone, talkies, gramophones, and the Empire State Building through postcards and letters. Presents would arrive from Chicago, Winnipeg, and New York, offering visions of the world as seen through their father’s eyes. Haunting and beautiful, this music-filled memoir tells with joyful immediacy of a time long gone, exacting the thrill and excitement of the world before the Great Depression.
A Single Swallow by Horatio Clare
A Single Swallow by Horatio Clare
From the slums of Cape Town to the palaces of Algiers, through Pygmy villages where pineapples grow wild, to the Gulf of Guinea where the sea blazes with oil flares, across two continents and fourteen countries – this epic journey is nothing to swallows, they do it twice a year. But for Horatio Clare, writer and birdwatcher, it is the expedition of a lifetime. Along the way he discovers old empires and modern tribes, a witch-doctor’s recipe for stewed swallow, explains how to travel without money or a passport, and describes a terrifying incident involving three Spanish soldiers and a tiny orange dog. By trains, motorbikes, canoes, one camel and three ships, Clare follows the swallows from reed beds in South Africa, where millions roost in February, to a barn in Wales, where a pair nest in May.
The Woman at the Window by Emyr Humphreys
The Woman at the Window by Emyr Humphreys
Gentle but haunting, this selection of short stories takes a closer look at the importance of parental and filial love down the generations. The protagonists reminisce over the pattern of their lives, looking back as well as forward, for the chance to rekindle lost loves and find a home for themselves. Throughout these eclectic tales, three comfortably retired men find their sedate dinner transformed into a conflict with a knife-wielding escaped prisoner in a pre-Celtic tomb, a trip to the site of their first meeting brings a married couple face to face with a corpse, and illusions are shattered when a retired teacher reunites with his first love. Examining the threads of survivors’ lives from childhood to old age, this anthology utilizes the backdrop of a shifting postwar Europe and Wales. Weighing the best part of a century of European history, this is a complex study of mature reflection, loss, and survival.
Self-Portrait as Ruth by Jasmine Donahaye
Self-Portrait as Ruth by Jasmine Donahaye
“Self-Portrait as Ruth” is a provocative collection exploring the subject of Israel-Palestine in sharp, accessible poems that eschew the conventional language or orientation of either Zionist or Palestinian solidarity. Rooted in a Jewish family history that reaches into nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine, “Self-Portrait as Ruth” is written in defiance of all ‘official’ versions of Israeli or Palestinian history. Polemical in places, the densely, painfully political subject matter is humanised throughout by a weaving together of individual and community, family and tribe, lover and self, nation and landscape. These poems are interrogations of the first person possessive – of claims, both singular and plural, to land, to identity, to history, and to the body – and of wounds and victimisation, both unique and collective. The subject matter is relentlessly topical and contested, whether focusing on the Palestinian story of catastrophe explored here in the lyrical love-poem Palestina, or on questions of Jewish guilt, investigated to forensic extent in poems such as “My Father’s Circumcision”, with its ‘innocent’ circumciser who, ‘with his ragged nail/tears the foreskin’ and ‘bends his head to suck the wound’, and in the short poem “Fetishes”, which juxtaposes anal sex and masturbation with perhaps the world’s most contentious place: the Western Wall in East Jerusalem. The concluding question, ‘how can you be sure the bloodprice that you paid will be enough?’ takes the moral interrogation of this collection beyond the topical matter of Israel-Palestine to universal issues of guilt and accountability. A challenging, aching, honest exploration of culpability, this lament will incite controversy and debate, making uncomfortable reading for partisans and non-partisans alike.
I Spy Pinhold Eye by Philip Gross
I Spy Pinhold Eye by Philip Gross
Fresh, creative, intellectually challenging and innovative—one of the finest collaborations between poet and photographer.
Wan-Hu’s Flying Chair by Richard Marggraf Turley
Wan-Hu’s Flying Chair by Richard Marggraf Turley
“Wan-Hu’s Flying Chair” explores the ‘furious stillness’ of love and art. From Chinese legends to scenes from artists’ studios, these poems open apertures on twilit worlds, where the ‘elastic collision of lovers’ burns, ears clang to the ‘torture of air’, and ‘winged creatures quiver on springs’. Here, the voices of old masters and artists’ wives, of holy men ‘huddled round three-legged dings’ and steam engineers dissolve into a curious chorus. In this collection, language seeks to break the ‘well of gravity’ as it ‘tidies the dark.’
The Meaning of Pictures by Peter Lord
The Meaning of Pictures by Peter Lord
Why do Welsh pictures painted between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries still matter today? This volume is mainly concerned with how pictures are understood by the people who use them—including patrons, museum curators, and the general public—rather than by the painters who paint them. The Meaning of Pictures discusses different aspects of painting unified by this common theme, including such topics as eighteenth-century painting, nineteenth-century genres, how pictures are valued by the art market, and how, since the 1980s, the Welsh art world has fought a reactionary battle against the New Art History movement.
(Source: Academi)
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