Tennis coach Judy Murray, conservationist John Lister-Kay and cookery guru Sue Lawrence will be among the authors taking part in Scotland’s annual celebration of books and literature. Crime writers Denise Mine, Val McDermid, Stuart MacBride and Christopher Brookmyre are all taking part in Book Week Scotland, the nationwide initiative about to be staged for the sixth time.
Matthew Fitt, the writer who is adapting JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books into Scots, will be giving special readings while a signed copy by the author of the second novel in the series will be auctioned off. The programme will also feature a workshop with former Scots Makar Liz Lochhead and an insight into the career of award-winning author Bernard MacLaverty.
For the fourth year, the cream of the crime writing world is gathering in East Anglia for the Noirwich Crime Writing Festival.
Among those appearing at the festival are Martina Cole from Essex who has written more than two dozen novels, the Scottish crime writer Val McDermid and mystery and suspense writer Anthony Horowitz.
Martina Cole, Anthony Horowitz and Val McDermid are all appearing at the Noriwich Crime Writing Festival.
Man Booker prize judge Colin Thubron has complained this week that star endorsements bully readers into admiring books, but it’s long been standard practice.
Setting cats among pigeons has long been an unofficial part of the contract for judges of the Booker prize. Remember Chris Mullin’s insistence on “zip–along” novels, or, way back in 1992, AN Wilson’s condemnation of the prize itself as “essentially trivial”?
This year’s flurry of fur and feathers was provoked by a tirade from Colin Thubron on celebrity endorsements. Some blurbs, said the veteran travel writer, “almost blackmail” readers into feeling that “you’re either intellectually or morally incompetent if you don’t love this book or you’ve failed if you haven’t understood it”. Some people, he felt, “seem to earn their living … saying: ‘This is the most profound book of our generation.’”
While he’s right to point out that “blurbs are outrageous in certain places”, it’s hardly a new phenomenon. The novelist Nathan Filer confronted the issue with disarming honesty at a festival three years ago. In a blogpost about the incident, he recalled “a kindly interviewer”, who hadn’t had time to read his debut novel, quoting a rather better-known novelist, who had. Filer’s The Shock of the Fall was “engaging, funny and inventive”, the interviewer assured the audience, in the words of Joe Dunthorne.
