November 2003
Embargo: Not for publication or broadcast before 00.00 hours on
Thursday 13 November 2003
2003 WHITBREAD BOOK AWARDS
SHORTLISTS
· Record number of entries for 2003 awards (468), including highest ever in the
Children’s Book Award category (111)
· Shortlists include three former Whitbread Award winners as well as Children’s Laureate
· First Novel Award shortlist includes Man Booker Prize winner DBC Pierre
Whitbread today announces the shortlists for the 2003 Whitbread Book Awards in the Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Book Award categories. The awards, which recognise some of the most enjoyable books of the last year by writers based in the UK and Ireland, were established by Whitbread, the UK’s leading leisure business, in 1971.
This year the awards attracted a record 468 entries, including the highest-ever number of entries in the Children’s Book Award category, mirroring the sector’s increasing vibrancy and mass readership appeal. Each category’s shortlist was selected by a panel of judges, this year including authors Tim Lott and Philip Hensher, Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, actress Jenny Agutter, radio and television broadcasters James Naughtie and Mark Lawson, and broadcaster Jane Moore.
Winners in the five categories, who will each receive £5,000, will be announced on Wednesday 7th January 2004. The overall winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year will receive a £25,000 prize and will be selected and announced on Tuesday 27th January 2004 at the Whitbread Book Awards ceremony in central London.
The Whitbread Book Awards, in partnership with the National Reading Campaign, CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals), amazon.co.uk and the Booksellers Association, continue to explore new ways of promoting the enjoyment of reading in the UK. Whitbread PLC is the pre-eminent business in the UK’s £172 billion leisure sector with a portfolio of market-leading brands in hotels, eating out, and health and fitness – including Marriott and Travel Inn hotels, Brewers Fayre and David Lloyd Leisure.
Full details of the shortlists follow. For additional information please visit www.whitbreadbookawards.co.uk
Ends
Notes for Editors:
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2003 WHITBREAD BOOK AWARDS SHORTLISTS
2003 Whitbread Novel Award shortlist (4 books)
The Lucky Ones by Rachel Cusk, Fourth Estate
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon ,Jonathan Cape
Heligoland by Shena Mackay , Jonathan Cape
Frankie & Stankie by Barbara Trapido , Bloomsbury
2003 Whitbread First Novel Award shortlist (4 books)
Buddha Da by Anne Donovan, Canongate Books
An Evening of Long Goodbyes by Paul Murray , Hamish Hamilton
Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre, Faber and Faber
An Empty Room by Talitha Stevenson , Virago
2003 Whitbread Poetry Award shortlist (4 books)
Minsk by Lavinia Greenlaw, Faber and Faber
Ink Stone by Jamie McKendrick, Faber and Faber
Landing Light by Don Paterson, Faber and Faber
Hard Water by Jean Sprackland, Jonathan Cape
2003 Whitbread Biography Award shortlist (4 books)
Margaret Thatcher - Volume Two: The Iron Lady by John Campbell, Jonathan Cape
Martha Gellhorn by Caroline Moorehead, Chatto & Windus
Orwell: The Life by D J Taylor , Chatto Windus
Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith by Andrew Wilson, Bloomsbury
2003 Whitbread Children’s Book Award shortlist (4 books)
The Fire-Eaters by David Almond, Hodder Children’s
The Oracle by Catherine Fisher, Hodder Children’s
Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo, HarperCollins
Naked Without a Hat by Jeanne Willis, Faber and Faber
1. To be eligible for the awards, books must have been published in the UK or Ireland between 1 November 2002 and 31 October 2003. Authors must have been domiciled in the UK or Ireland since November 2000.
2. The total prize fund for the Whitbread Awards now stand at £50,000. The award winners from the five categories - Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Book - each receive £5,000.
3. The overall Whitbread Book of the Year is selected from the five category Award winners with the winner receiving a further £25,000. The winner will be announced at the awards ceremony at The Brewery on January 27, 2004.
Shortlist for the 2003 Whitbread Novel Award (130 entries)
Judges
Philip Hensher Author
Mark Lawson Journalist, Broadcaster and Author
Kate Summerscale Literary Editor, Daily Telegraph
The Lucky Ones by Rachel Cusk (Fourth Estate £15.99)
A young pregnant woman's misfortune; a new father's disaffection; a daughter's search for lost childhood; a mother's antagonism; a wife's secret suffering – through it all runs the story of Victor Porter, a campaigning lawyer, and his journalist wife Serena, in whose relationship the conflict between the public and the personal, between love and morality, is played out.
Rachel Cusk is the author of three novels: Saving Agnes, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award, The Temporary and The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award. Her non-fiction account of becoming a mother, A Life’s Work, was critically acclaimed as well as generating much controversy and debate. Cusk was selected as one of the Granta Best of Young British Novelists 2003.
Judges: “Cusk takes subjects which some consider small – the relationships within a family – and gives them the weight which they have in real lives in crisp and witty prose, which captures characters through sharply observed details.”
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
(Jonathan Cape £10.99)
A murder mystery novel like no other: The detective and narrator is Christopher Boone, a fifteen year old boy with Asperger’s, a form of autism. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He has never gone further then the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour’s dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying journey which will turn his whole world upside down.
Mark Haddon, author, illustrator and screenwriter, has written 18 books for children and won 2 BAFTAs. He is currently writing the TV adaptation of Fungus the Bogeyman for BBC and lives in Oxford with his wife and son.
The Judges: “A fresh and enchanting story narrated by a boy who is brilliant with numbers and baffled by feelings. We found it moving, enlightening, funny and a breeze to read.”
Heligoland by Shena Mackay (Jonathan Cape £15.99)
Celeste Zylberstein and Francis Campion are the only two original inhabitants left at the Nautilus, a strange South London building shaped like a chambered shell, which was a thriving artistic community in the 1930s. Gus Crabb, a dealer in bric-a-brac is the only other resident until Rowena Snow moves in seeking her own Utopia or the Heligoland of her childhood imagination.
Shena Mackay is the author of two novellas, eight previous novels and four collections of short stories. The Orchard on Fire was shortlisted for the 1996 Booker Prize.
Judges: “Mackay’s world of small epiphanies and hard-won happiness is entirely her own, and Heligoland is the beautiful work of a writer who generously sees the potential for beauty and happiness in the most quiet and ordinary lives.”
Frankie & Stankie by Barabara Trapido (Bloomsbury £16.99)
Dinah and her sister Lisa, two little girls from a dissenting liberal family, are growing up in 1950's South Africa, where racial laws are tightening. As the apparatus of repression rolls on, Dinah finds her own way, escaping into rewarding friendships. As we follow Dinah's journey through childhood and adolescence, we enter into one of the darker passages of 20th century history.
Barbara Trapido was born in South Africa and is the author of five novels including Brother of the More Famous Jack, Temples of Delight and, most recently, The Travelling Hornplayer (shortlisted for the 1998 Whitbread Novel Award). She lives in Oxford.
Judges: “We thought Trapido’s Frankie and Stankie was the book she was born to write. With an uncanny precision of recollection, she conveys the tumultuous catastrophe of South African history through one girl’s extraordinary, funny, dramatic early life.”
Shortlist for the 2003 Whitbread First Novel Award (67 entries)
Judges
Tim Lott , Author
Jane Moore, Journalist and Author
Patrick Neale , The Bookshop, Chipping Norton
Buddha Da by Anne Donovan (Canongate Books £9.99)
Da, a Glaswegian painter and decorator, has always been game for a laugh. So when he first takes up meditation at the Buddhist Centre, no one takes him seriously, especially when his pursuit of the new lama ends in a trip round the Carmunnock bypass. But as Jimmy becomes more involved in a search for the spiritual, his beliefs start to come into conflict with the needs of his wife, Liz. Cracks appear in their apparently happy family life, and the ensuing events change the lives of each family member.
Anne Donovan, based in Glasgow, is an exciting addition to the modern band of Scottish writers. She was nominated for the Canongate Prize for New Writing in 1999, and the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story competition. Anne is also author of the acclaimed collection Hieroglyphics and Other Stories.
Judges: “Buddha Da is a warm and witty exploration of a family in crisis. When Jimmy, a Glasgow painter and decorator, discovers Buddhism, his wife, his daughter and himself spiral into confusion. Humorous and heartfelt, it’s both original in its style, using multiple viewpoints, and rich in language and dialect. It is contemporary, polished and very delicate.”
An Evening of Long Goodbyes by Paul Murray (Hamish Hamilton £10.99)
Acclaimed as one of the funniest and most assured Irish novels of recent years, An Evening of Long Goodbyes is the story of Dubliner Charles Hythloday and the heroic squandering of the family inheritance. Featuring drinking, greyhound racing, vanishing furniture, more drinking, old movies, assorted Dublin lowlife, eviction and the perils of community theatre, this debut novel is a tour de force of comedic writing wrapped in an honest-to-goodness tale of a man – and a family – living in denial.
Paul Murray studied English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin and took a Masters Degree in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. A former bookseller, he is 28 years old and lives in Dublin.
Judges: “A typical modern Irish novel done with extraordinary wit and dexterity. Big, convoluted, with a cast of engaging characters, the story of the fall from grace of the fogey Charles Hythloday into the profanity of the modern world is compelling, brilliantly constructed and very funny, encompassing Bosnians in the attic, crazed Irish gangsters and even a redemptive greyhound. An Evening of Long Goodbyes is delivered with great panache and is a fantastic read.”
Vernon God Little by D B C Pierre (Faber and Faber £12.99)
Vernon Gregory Little has secrets – but none of them, or so he assumes, have anything to do with the recent massacre of sixteen students at his high school. What he cannot see is that the quirky Texan backwater of Martirio is unable to face its role in the tragedy, and has become a deadly crucible as all eyes turn on Vernon. The media, his mother’s social circle, and the increasingly prosperous townsfolk lead Vernon a merry dance of self-incrimination, as he flees to Mexico, is captured and put on trial as Texas’ most notorious serial killer. Then, on the afternoon of his execution, Vernon conceives a wholly modern solution to his dilemma – one that calls for the greatest crime of all.
D B C Pierre was born in Australia, but brought up in Mexico. Despite a 'fairy-tale' childhood, he increasingly escaped home to run with the street crowd. He has travelled extensively, has worked as a designer and is internationally published as a cartoonist. He currently lives in Ireland.
Judges: “Vernon God Little is a roar of energy, crazed and scabrous, from the heart of the white underbelly of America. Echoing Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’ with its voice of disenfranchised American youth, it manages to combine supercharged wit, cracking dialogue and dark profundity.”
An Empty Room by Talitha Stevenson (Virago £14.99)
Following the seemingly endless summer Emily experiences just before going up to university - staying up all night, sleeping all day, drinking, drugs, clubs and sex – Emily and her friends feel total freedom which promises so much yet delivers an overwhelming sense of self-betrayal. In her search to believe in something or someone, Emily finds herself drawn to her boyfriend’s complex older cousin – but Simon is married and their ensuing affair forces her to construct her own sense of right and wrong at the very moment she sees the moral emptiness surrounding her.
Talitha Stevenson was born in 1975, attended three schools before the age of ten, then spent a year as a groom in a racing stable before attending an unconventional, 'alternative education' school in London. She read English Literature at Christ Church Oxford, but left after a year in order to write and to live in an artists’ commune in Florence. To fund her writing, she’s been a portrait model, a photographic model, a horse-trainer, an English teacher and a nanny for children with special needs. Her journalism has appeared in the Daily Mail and The Guardian.
Judges: “A taut, immensely engaging novel from the outset. Pure, but certainly not simplistic, it draws the reader into a claustrophobic world of first love angst and delivers a satisfying and mature ending. A compelling, brilliant debut, written without a wasted word, it tackles well-trodden territory in an original and poignant way.”
Shortlist for the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Award (62 entries)
Judges
Andrew Ching Bookseller (Waterstone’s)
Andrew Motion Poet Laureate
Christina Patterson Deputy Literary Editor, The Independent
Minsk by Lavinia Greenlaw (Faber and Faber £12.99)
Minsk takes the reader through various enclosures at London Zoo via an Essex village and an infamous cocktail, and concludes in the Arctic Circle, where winter sets in ‘like a drink of glass’. Throughout, Greenlaw explores notions of place – the childhood landscapes we leave behind, those we travel towards, and those like ‘Minsk’ that we imagine to be missing from our lives.
Lavinia Greenlaw has worked in publishing and arts administration, and is now a freelance writer, broadcaster and critic, and lectures in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College. She has garnered considerable acclaim for her two previous poetry collections and her novel, Mary George of Allnorthover.
Judges: “Lavinia Greenlaw writes with breathtaking precision about memory, childhood and the landscape - both literal and metaphorical - that shapes our lives. This is a coolly hypnotic collection from one of our most talented poets, which demands and rewards re-reading.”
Inkstone by Jamie McKendrick (Faber and Faber £8.99)
In his first collection as a Faber poet, McKendrick explores the grain or ‘tooth’ of the natural world with unusual and discomforting detail - not only what the eye sees, but the eye itself, its structure and structurings.
Jamie McKendrick is the author of three volumes of poetry. He is the editor of 20th Century Italian poems (shortly to be published by Faber) and is currently completing a translation of the poetry of Valerio Magrelli.
Judges: “It’s easy to overlook the excellence of Jamie McKendrick’s book: the language is comparatively quiet and unshowy, the tone of voice unassuming. But these are poems of great subtlety, watchfulness, and formal dexterity. They grow stealthily in our minds and continue to haunt us long after a first reading.”
Landing Light By Don Paterson (Faber and Faber £12.99)
Landing Light is Paterson’s most spiritual and accomplished collection to date, in which he guides the reader down the labyrinths of our most private emotions, pursuing the intimacy that the spoken – as well as the printed – word brings. Ceaselessly inquiring, deftly tuned into the emotional crackle of the world, Paterson explores the swings of light and dark that mark out our most troubling feelings.
Don Paterson is the author of three collections of poetry – Nil Nil, God’s Gift to Women and The Eyes – and the recipient of several literary awards. He’s a guitarist and composer and has written drama for the stage and for radio. He is currently Poetry Editor for Picador.
Judges: “This is a dazzling book: formally ambitious, generous in its choice of subjects, serious but playful in its terms of engagement. Full of grace but also of gravity, it shows one of our best contemporary poets extending his range to include the life of the spirit, as well as life on familiar ground.”
Hard Water by Jean Sprackland (Jonathan Cape £8.00)
Though firmly rooted in the domestic, natural world, Jean Sprackland’s poems are thrilling excursions into every day lives, lived in dreams, in grief and in love. These vivid poems are full of light and weather and water.
Jean Sprackland lives in Merseyside and her book Tattoos for Mothers’ Day was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 1999. Hard Water is her second collection. She lives in Merseyside.
Judges: “A beautiful and accessible collection which should find a large readership. It’s a book about roots and curiosity – about having a place where you belong, but also a need to reach out to new experiences to communicate. Passionate, often sexy, it displays a sharp and sometimes wicked humour.”
Shortlist for the 2003 Whitbread Biography Award (98 entries)
Judges
Laurence Howell Freelance Book Consultant
Ysenda Maxtone Graham Author
James Naughtie Presenter: Today and Bookclub, BBC Radio 4
Margaret Thatcher - Volume Two: The Iron Lady by John Campbell (Jonathan Cape £25.00)
In this second instalment, Campbell covers the eleven and a half years of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. Thirteen years after her removal from power, this is the first comprehensive and fully researched study of the Thatcher Government from its hesitant beginning to its dramatic end.
John Campbell is the author of biographies of Lloyd George, F.E. Smith, Roy Jenkins, Aneurin Bevan and Edward Heath, for which he won the NCR Award.
Judges: “The second volume of Campbell’s biography of Margaret Thatcher catches the ambiguities and breadth of a dominant political life. Even when dealing with events that will be fairly fresh in the minds of most readers, he manages to create a sense of immediacy without sacrificing a biographer’s proper distance. He understands how complicated a figure Margaret Thatcher was.”
Martha Gellhorn by Caroline Moorehead (Chatto & Windus) £20.00
Martha Gellhorn’s reporting tracks many of the flashpoints of the 20th century: witnessing the Depression in a state of righteous fury, risking her life in the Spanish Civil War, and in the Second World War covering the fall of Czechoslovakia and the Normandy Landings, the liberation of Dachau and the Nuremberg Trials. She reported from Vietnam and Israel and, at the age of 81, was covering the US invasion of Panama. All her life, Martha fought against injustice.
Caroline Moorehead is the biographer of Bertrand Russell, Freya Stark and Iris Origo. She is well known for her work in human rights and has published a history of the International Committee of the Red Cross. She lives in London and is currently writing a book about refugees, entitled Human Cargo.
Judges: “Moorehead’s life of Martha Gellhorn is a warm telling of the story that seemed to encompass many of the contradictions of the 20th century – the rise of American high society, the wars which dominated her era and the life of journalism and celebrity, which Gellhorn led. It’s a passionate memoir of a woman who collected friends and causes with gusto in a long life, including a marriage to Ernest Hemmingway, but died alone by her own hand.”
Orwell: The Life by DJ Taylor (Chatto & Windus £20)
In the last half-century George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four have sold over 30 million copies. The adjective ‘Orwellian’ is now a byword for a particular way of thinking about life, literature and language, while Orwell himself has become one of the most potent and symbolic figures in western political thought. Drawing on a mass of previously unseen material, including interviews with friends and people who knew him in his years of obscurity, Taylor offers a strikingly human portrait of the writer too often embalmed as a secular saint.
D J Taylor is well-known as a novelist, critic and reviewer: his non-fiction books include After the War: The Novel and England Since 1945 and an acclaimed biography, Thackeray. He lives in Norwich.
Judges: “A daring book, boldly written, with little self-indulgence. Taylor doesn’t allow his mesmerizing subject to overwhelm him and uses original insights and skills to put a complicated life into a compelling and beautiful framework. Above all, for a literary life, it makes a rattling good read.”
Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith by Andrew Wilson (Bloomsbury £25.00)
Patricia Highsmith – author of Strangers On A Train and The Talented Mr Ripley – had more than her fair share of secrets. During her life, she felt uncomfortable about discussing the source of her fiction and refused to answer questions about her private life. Yet after her death in February 1995, Highsmith left behind a vast archive of personal documents – diaries, notebooks and letters – which detail the links between her life and her work. Drawing on these, together with material gleaned from her closest friends and lovers, Wilson has written the first biography of an author described by Graham Greene as the ‘poet of apprehension’ and by Gore Vidal as ‘one of our greatest modernist writers’.
Andrew Wilson was born in Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, in 1967. He studied English at King's College, London and Journalism at City University, London. After leaving in 1989, winning the John Willis Memorial Prize for an investigation into male prostitution, he started work as a magazine journalist, before embarking on a freelance career as a features and investigative writer for publications including the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Independent on Sunday and the Guardian. This is his first book.
Judges: “Wilson’s first book is a remarkable account of a bizarre life, following the mistress of this menacing story on her raunchy and reclusive wanderings around Europe. This is a beguiling and passionate story, pulling a strange literary figure out of the shadows and explaining how her fiction – especially her psychotic antihero Ripley – came into being. It’s a hypnotic biography.”
Shortlist for the 2003
Whitbread Children’s Book Award (111 entries)
Judges
Jenny Agutter Actress
Colin Brabazon Head of Children’s Library Services, North Lincs Council
Gillian Cross Author
Lizo Mzimba Presenter: CBBC Newsround, BBC Television
Niral Panchal Young Judge: Write Here, Write Now competition winner
Jacquie Peate Young Judge: CBBC Newsround, ‘Presspacker’
The Fire-Eaters by David Almond (Hodder Children’s £10.99)
The Fire-Eaters is the deceptively simple tale of Bobby Burns, a boy growing up in a seaside community near Newcastle at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Bobby’s world is fraught with change and uncertainty from the looming political crisis to the much closer terrors of starting a new school and witnessing his dad’s health falter.
David Almond's first novel for children, Skellig, won the Whitbread Children's Book of the Year and the Carnegie Medal, and his second, Kit’s Wilderness, won the Smarties Award Silver Medal, was Highly Commended for the Carnegie Medal, and shortlisted for the Guardian Award. Almond lives with his family in Northumbria.
Judges: “A book that celebrates the mysteries that life holds of living, loving and fighting for what’s right in a world which may end tomorrow.”
The Oracle by Catherine Fisher (Hodder Children’s £5.99)
First of a compelling two-book fantasy full of action, betrayals and mystery, drawing on the rituals of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. In the distant land of deserts and islands, the servants of the god rule the land. His wishes are conveyed through the Oracle, and interpreted by the High Priestess. Mirany is the new Bearer, afraid of her perilous duties for the god in the rituals of The Oracle, and fearful of her secret doubts...
Catherine Fisher is an award-winning fantasy writer, the author of 13 books for children and two volumes of award-winning poetry. The Conjuror's Game was shortlisted for the Smarties Award, The Snow-Walker's Son for the W.H.Smith Mind Boggling Award and The Candle Man won the Tir-Na-n'Og Award. She is also a holder of an Arts Council Writers' Bursary.
Judges: “The outstanding story of a young girl whose actions could save or destroy an ancient civilisation. Compellingly written from the shocking opening to the astonishing climax.”
Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo (HarperCollins 10.99)
Exploring the nature of heroism and cowardice, of innocence and evil, Private Peaceful is set in the First World War. Told through the voice of a young soldier, Private Thomas Peaceful, it charts the last eight hours of a young life, blending the innocence of a rural childhood with the horror of a World War 1 battlefield.
Michael Morpurgo MBE became the third Children's Laureate in May 2003. He taught for ten years in both state and private schools, and has published over 95 titles since his first book was published in 1975. These have been translated into over twenty languages, many have been adapted for the theatre and five have been made into films. His books have won the Whitbread Children’s Award, the Smarties Book Prize, the Children's Book Award and Cercle D'Or Prix Sorciere (France), and several have been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. Now living in Devon, Michael is married with three children and six grandchildren, and he and his wife Clare run the charity Farms for City Children, work for which he was awarded the MBE in 1999.
Judges: “A perfect short novel, written in clear, direct, unsentimental prose, Private Peaceful is enormously powerful and affecting. This is a novel with a point to make, but which never fails to engage the reader in the lives and experiences of its characters. Morpurgo excels at capturing the essence of feeling and memories.”
Naked Without a Hat by Jeanne Willis (Faber and Faber £5.99)
Will had just left home. He wasn't on the best speaking terms with his mum but then who was? She wouldn't let him grow up. He was capable of looking after himself wasn't he? As long as he had his lucky beanie hat nothing could go wrong - especially when he meets the beautiful and spirited Zara. She makes Will feel amazing and vice versa. This was just too good to be true...until Will's huge childhood secret threatens to come between their future and their dreams.
Jeanne Willis lives in London with her husband and two children. She worked for 20 years in advertising as a copywriter and became the youngest person ever to sit as a board director at Young and Rubicam. It was during this time that Jeanne began writing for children. First published in 1981, Jeanne has written over 40 children’s books including picture books, poetry and a number of novels.
Judges: “A quirky love story, which combines wit and originality with a wise refusal to let people be pigeonholed. It is funny, beautifully written and constantly surprising.”
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