Awards

Time and the Novel

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In her interview with Robert Lee Brewer of Writer’s Digest on 19 July 2026, Julie Burtin says that time is an underrated ingredient in the creation of a novel.

Julie Burtin

Julie Buntin‘s debut novel, Marlena, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, released in 10 territories worldwide, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen outlets, including The Washington Post, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews. She is the co-editor of Notes to New Mothers, a collection of dispatches from postpartum life by sixty writers and artists. Previously, Buntin was an editor and director of writing programs at Catapult. Now, she writes and teaches in Ann Arbor, where she is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. 

What prompted you to write this book?

I was haunted by a lot of experiences from my girlhood and early adulthood, particularly moments when, instead of standing up for myself, I’d chosen instead to make myself smaller. I grew up with an absent father and was interested in tracing the way not knowing the answer to such a formative question about one’s identity—where do I come from?—might turn a young woman into a seeker, and how easy it would be for her to look for the answer in all the wrong places.

In the post #MeToo landscape of 2019, I was also still processing the fact that my professional life was built upon affiliations with institutions, many of which hid a rotten man or several at their core. As a writer, I’m really drawn to things I can’t make sense of, experiences I’ve had or things I’ve observed that have some unresolvable contradiction in them. I came to this book from that place, trying to parse what it meant to have been in some ways complicit in the same structures that held me back.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

About seven years. I started the novel in May of 2019 and it’s out this summer. It was in production for the last year-ish, so that’s about six years of writing, with some long breaks after the births of each of my children. Those breaks were an interesting part of the process with this book—I found that when I returned to the novel, it felt like something another me had written, which made it easier to do big, transformative revisions along the way, including adding a middle section from the perspective of a peripheral character that I then cut after my second kid was born. The general shape of the book stayed pretty consistent over time, but how I approached it underwent a ton of change.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

It’s been interesting to learn how much the publishing industry has changed since I last published a book in 2017. There are far fewer outlets for reviews, and traditional media coverage seems harder to crack than ever. But it’s been heartening to see how much fascinating, smart discourse there is about literature online, particularly on Substack. I have been (truly) living under a rock in the Midwest with only infants and grad students for company for some time, and when I joined Substack a couple of months ago I had a digital version of the feeling I used to get in NYC at good book parties. A sense of having stumbled into the most interesting conversation around. 

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

I was surprised by how long it took, and how much motherhood and teaching slowed me down, while also adding new dimensions to how I think about fiction and writing and life.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

Will is a character who makes frustrating decisions, particularly about her relationships with men and her sense of her own value. As I wrote I tried, as much as possible and to the extent that it made sense for the characters/story, to steer toward complexity, nuance. I hope that the book provokes reflection, strong reactions, conversation. That it’s the kind of text that you want to discuss with someone else—that in the things it leaves unresolved, it forces the reader to come to new and perhaps surprising conclusions.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Time is an underrated ingredient in the making of a novel; I’m not talking about internal time, the clock that composes the architecture of the book (though of course that’s crucial), I’m talking about the time of writing it. How long it takes, how much life you live as you undergo it, and how you change, also changes the book. Some books need more or less time—try to honor that, and be patient with yourself and your project if you find you’re embedded in something that needs more of your life to work itself out.

? Book Prizes ?

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There is an article (quite long, but I have abbreviated it below) on Rebecca Makkai’s substack dated 2 June 2026 with the title “Book Prizes Don’t Work How You Think”.

.Rebecca Makkai is an American novelist and short story writer. She is best known for writing The Great Believers and I Have Some Questions for You, which have been positively received by critics and won awards such as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the Libby Book Award.

Rebecca Makkia

She says, “I want to start by preventing some heart attacks and assuring the administrators of every book prize I’ve ever judged that I am NOT about to disclose any secrets of the judging room.

But authors and readers (and even editors) tend to have enormous, if understandable, misconceptions of how the prize-judging process works, and I’m happy to clear some of them up.

If I’m counting right, I’ve judged six book prizes in the past eight years, which is RIDICULOUS and no one in their right mind would ever do this. By “book prize,” I mean the kind where a panel of judges reads many, many published and eligible books and then comes up sometimes with a longlist, usually with a shortlist, and (almost) always with a winner. These would be prizes like the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, Canada’s Giller Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award—all of which, for confoundingly masochistic reasons, I’ve judged. (I was absolutely thrilled to be the chair of the Pulitzer fiction jury this year, and I’ll say more about that below.)

There are other kinds of prizes, too. There are ones where one single judge is sent three published books and picks a winner for, say, a state book of the year. There are others where a single judge reads a bunch of finalist manuscripts and picks one to get published by a small press. There’s the kind of prize you get when you’re a kid and you read twenty-five books in one summer and the library lets you pick out any book and they’ll order it for you, and of course this is the best possible prize in the entire literary world.

Every year, speculation articles appear with people guessing winners (for the Pulitzer and National Book Award and Booker in particular) based on absolutely irrelevant factors like whether an entirely different jury liked this author’s last book five years ago, or whether this book was on other juries’ lists for other prizes. Any article that gets people talking about books is a great thing, but the speculation part is, I hate to say it, useless.

Here are the things I’ve learned by judging.

There’s no “they”

Book prizes are nearly always judged not by the organizations that administer them but by small groups (usually 3 or 5) of authors and, occasionally, critics or booksellers. The organization itself (usually a small, underfunded but valiant nonprofit—yes, even the very famous organizations) is usually responsible only for screening submissions for eligibility: Was the book published this year, does the author live in the US, is the author indeed under 35 or Jewish or a debut short story writer?

In every prize I’ve ever judged or heard firsthand reports of, everything else is up to the judges and their idiosyncrasies. There’s no input from anyone else. The heads of these organizations often learn the winner at the same moment the rest of the world does.

So what the NBA* judges liked LAST time is completely irrelevant. The same five authors could just as easily be picked to judge the NBA as to judge the Pulitzer or the Story Prize, and what organization they’re attached to would have little bearing on the results. (Which makes it funny that there are vastly different levels of prestige associated with different prizes, right?)

I think this is healthy for authors to understand. Not being a finalist for something doesn’t mean that a whole organization found you lacking. It means that three or five individual human judges with idiosyncratic tastes didn’t mutually judge yours to be one of the very, very top books in the pile.

*I’m just going to say NBA throughout this article and trust that you aren’t picturing LeBron.

There’s an 11th place

Every time a longlist of ten books comes out, there was an 11th place book that almost, almost made the list. Three Pulitzer finalists are made public, but of course there’s always a fourth choice, and fifth, and sixth. And (unless an unscrupulous judge gets drunk and spills the beans at a party) those authors will never know it.

As a judge, this kills me. Someone’s life would have been changed, but just barely wasn’t. Someone out there is wondering if it’s all worth it, never knowing that judges fell madly in love with their work and were gutted not to be able to highlight it.

There are so, so many books

For a small ($0 to $500 to $5000) honorarium, you’re expected to get to hundreds of books within about a six-month period. Some prizes just ask you to read twenty books, or read what appeals to you, but the biggest book prizes can receive up to 600 valid submissions. This means two things, and I don’t think I’m revealing state secrets here: 1) Not every judge can look at every single book; and 2) When a judge realizes they don’t love a book, they can put it down.

I’ll touch more on the first point below. If the second point sounds unfair to you, I’ll explain below the breadth of what gets sent in… But also, listen, if the first paragraph of a novel is very bad (and so that I don’t hurt your feelings, let’s suppose it’s awkward, ungrammatical, sexist, opaque, and full of conspiracy theories)—why on earth would I continue reading in the hopes that somehow this book will become magically brilliant, brilliant enough to make up for that paragraph and be the winner of this major award? I have 100 other books to get to. I am not a fast reader. (In my experience, most writers aren’t.) Any good reason to put a book down is a blessing.

In most cases, judges split up the first round of reading, weeding out things they don’t want to consider and passing along to the group the ones they like. There are different ways of splitting the list—alphabetically, by interest, at random—but usually the best practice is to divide and conquer. Even so, depending on the number of submissions and the number of judges, each person might be personally responsible for 200 books. This means reading nonstop, screening things on audio when you shower, picking up your e-reader at red lights, bringing ten Advance Reader Copies for a weekend at your in-laws’.

While I do know one judge who claims to have read at least 20 pages into every single one of the 500 submissions for a major prize, he took a sabbatical to do it. Poetry judges have it the easiest; one poem can tell you a lot about whether to continue reading. YA judges at least have shorter books. Judges of adult fiction and nonfiction have by far the most work.

This means your book is always going to be a victim of fate

Not every book can be read under the ideal circumstances (hammock, margarita), and it’s also entirely possible that while four of the five judges would have loved your book, your first reader happens to be the one judge who really doesn’t connect with it and won’t pass it on.

Each panel of judges has its own ethos

While some prizes stipulate specific criteria (the Pulitzer fiction guidelines, for instance, state that the prize will preferably go to a book “dealing with American life”), most panels of judges are simply told to pick the best book of the year. That’s regardless of the author’s track record or fame or reputation. Simply the best book.

But what does that mean?

Judges usually communicate (on Zoom, and/or via spreadsheets and emails) throughout the process, and often at some point define their own criteria. Are they simply looking for the best-executed book in their genre? Or the most innovative? The book that everyone should still be reading in fifty years? The book that affected them the most?

And then there’s just the alchemy of the group itself. On one panel, we all discovered we’d grown up on farms* and so we were particularly drawn, as a group, to agriculturally-themed books.**

*absolutely not, this is a stand-in for the truth

**nope

The process is purer than you’d guess

Authors and readers love to assume some cronyism in the process, and while I can’t guarantee it’s never happened, I can say I’ve never seen it happen, and I’ve only ever heard of one instance anecdotally years ago, and that guy was publicly shamed.

A writer who has reached the level of prominence at which they’d be asked to judge a major prize has many writer friends; so being friends with a judge is not going to get anyone ahead. If 400 books are submitted, it’s likely that 75 are from people I know well, 50 are online buddies, 10 are from my press, three are from my agent, and one is that fun debut author who started the conga line at Bread Loaf. Judges scrupulously recuse themselves from reading or voting on authors about whom they don’t think they can be neutral, and they disclose personal or professional relationships. People will hand books off to other judges because the authors are former students, or close friends, or because they just can’t stand the guy. Recusals and disclosures continue up to the end.

I’ll also hand off a book because I suspect I might not be the right reader for it, but that the right judge might love it and really champion it. One such book eventually made it onto the shortlist for something I judged.

It’s also far more random than you’d guess

Because the very first round of reading often involves just one set of eyes on a book, whether a book makes it to the next round can depend entirely on the tastes of one person. One person! A person who also might not care for chocolate, or who loves ketchup on their eggs. A person who just was not up for this particular book at this particular moment. Or (see seven zillion books in six months) might not have had the luxury of putting a book down on a bad day and picking it up again in the right mood.

Conversely: It helps if the book sounds promising to a particular judge. (Literary sci-fi set in Paraguay? I was just in Paraguay! Give it here!) And yes, that “promise” could, even subconsciously, have to do with the author’s strong reputation or with a lot of praise around the book. (Some judges actively seek out book reviews to help them prioritize; others avoid them completely.) Of course, that huge reputation or excessive praise could backfire, too. And there’s a thrill to discovering someone new or overlooked. We were all new once. We’ve all felt overlooked. We’d all love to be the ones to find the best new thing.

It helps if the book came out early enough in the year that the judge might have picked it up before the judging period even began. (Although in the long run, it can help if a judge reads a book late in the process and is freshly in its thrall when the judging conversations happen.)

And then in the assessment itself, there’s a bewildering amount of randomness. Think of all the books you read in the past year, and pick your top five. Then think about it an hour later, and see if you’ve changed your mind or if you’re second-guessing yourself. Have a good nap and see how you feel about it then. What about a week from now?

I’m going to share an anonymous story from a friend who was judging a big prize several years ago: “We got on the phone to discuss our longlist. To fill one remaining spot, I consulted my reading notebook and named a book I was happy with. A day later, I realized I’d neglected to enter one of my favorites of the year into my notebook, and had forgotten it during our discussion. I might have named that work instead. But I didn’t.”

I’ve also heard about committees in which one judge didn’t pull their weight and the other judges weren’t able to pick up all the slack—meaning some submitted books barely got looked at.

You’d be amazed what isn’t submitted

Those last two details might have thrown you into panic mode, but I hope you saved some rage.

Some prizes require a submission fee, and some don’t. Some allow submissions directly from authors, and some require the submissions to come from publicists or editors. In either case, publicists and editors make decisions about which titles from their list to send in to which prizes. Even when submission is free, they want their nominations to mean something. If Random House sent in literally every one of its 2026 novels for a certain prize, it would overwhelm and probably annoy the judges.

The submission fee can be an obstacle for small presses, unfortunately. But why a major press would not submit a book from an established prize winner—a book that’s making all kinds of best-of-the-year lists—for a major prize, is absolutely beyond me. But those balls get dropped all the time.

Several years ago, I was judging a prize for which we split our initial reading by alphabet section. Let’s say I had A-G. Late in the game, a friend asked what I thought of the new Jane Doe. I texted back: “Jane Doe has a new book????” Jane Doe was a Pulitzer winner at the top of her career.

A friend was judging nonfiction for a major prize and the whole group agreed, over email, that there was a clear frontrunner, a book they’d all read and loved. Only then did they realize it hadn’t been submitted before the deadline.

Another friend judging one of the biggest fiction prizes tells me the book that won—a win that made the author’s career—was initially not submitted. One of the judges had read a great review of it, and reached out right before the deadline asking that the book be sent in. I’ve also heard of judges reaching out, asking for a book to be submitted, and the book still not being sent.

Perhaps the tedious task of filling prize entry forms gets delegated to interns. Perhaps there are gremlins in the system. But if I were an editor, I’d be breathing down the neck of whoever was responsible for submissions.

You’d also be amazed what is submitted

And then there are the times you have to ask yourself why on earth a press or an individual bothered submitting a certain title. I’m talking about, for example, book #3 in a children’s trilogy about dragons being submitted for a major adult literary prize.

When the book is wildly inappropriate to the prize (a steamy, formula bodice ripper sent in for the Booker), there are three possibilities I can think of: 1) The press is obligated to send the book in for all major prizes because the author, who sells a lot of books, got it in their contract. 2) An author sent it in not having researched what the prize is, the past winners, etc. or just having great confidence that THIS educational comic book about Christian frogs is going to win over all those cold, hard literary hearts. 3) The author knows damn well that this isn’t going to work, but wants to say the book “was nominated for the Pulitzer” in the hopes that people think this means it was a finalist. (This happens often enough that the Pulitzer website now states, “We discourage someone saying he or she was “nominated” for a Pulitzer simply because an entry was sent to us.”)

Panels aren’t gunning for forced diversity

Every couple of years, someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about complains publicly that judging panels are picking books based on wokeness or diversity quotas or some other nonsense.

Every panel I’ve been part of has paused for a second after we’ve chosen our list for a little after-the-fact audit, checking that unconscious biases didn’t make us notably uneven on things like gender balance, ethnicity, genre (Did we pick ten novels and no short story collections? Are we cool with that?), press size, and even topic. And not once have we ever needed to make an adjustment.

It’s true that longlists don’t look like they used to. This might have to do with prize committees themselves finally diversifying, which means a broader variety of opinions and tastes. And it might have to do with all of us preferring books that, you know, do not sound like every other book we’ve read.

It turns out that when we read broadly and fairly, it’s no longer true that 95% of prizes go to straight white men, go figure.

The Pulitzers are different

It’s worth noting that the Pulitzers have an unusual setup. For each category, a jury of five authors and critics nominates three finalists, and then sends them on to the Pulitzer Board at Columbia University—a board composed largely of journalists, with one resident poet, one novelist, etc. People tend to serve on this board for multiple years. The Pulitzer Board meets for two days on campus at Columbia, after having read all finalists, to make the final decisions on everything from fiction to photojournalism to regional news coverage.

Then there’s this, from the Pulitzer website (bolding is mine): “Awards are made by majority vote, but the Board is also empowered to vote ‘no award,’ or by three-fourths vote to select an entry that has not been nominated or to switch nominations among the categories. If the Board is dissatisfied with the nominations of any jury, it can ask the Administrator to consult with the chair to ascertain if there are other worthy entries. Meanwhile, the deliberations continue.” Among other things, this means the jury needs to have a secret fourth choice lying in wait. And it’s a fourth choice that will likely never be revealed. And it means that as a jurist, you don’t actually know if they’ll pick one of your books or go with something completely different. It also means that when you see three finalists plus a winner announced (rather than two finalists plus a winner) something interesting has happened.

Another difference: For most prizes, the identity of the judges is public. The Pulitzer jury for each category must remain secret until the prizes are announced. Many awards are announced and bestowed at a black tie event. The Pulitzers are announced in a livestream online, and then awarded at a lunch in a library on the Columbia campus. Finalists (I was a finalist in 2019) don’t get to attend, but are sent a nifty snail mail letter that’s framable.

Our reading as a jury ended in December, when we sent in our three finalists. We didn’t know the winner until the moment it was announced publicly last month. (Fortunately, I loved all three finalists equally, so I had the fun of sitting at my laptop with the StoryStudio staff, to whom I’d revealed my judging about five minutes earlier, waiting to whoop for joy regardless of the outcome. Indeed I whoopt.)

If you’re ever a finalist at a live ceremony, here’s what to do

That Pulitzer livestream is lovely, but it’s extremely fun to dress up and go to some ballroom where everything is announced live and you can pretend people care about this as much as the Oscars.

If you are ever in the position of needing to dress up for a live awards ceremony where the winner will be announced and suddenly have to take the stage and say something, you need to do two things. 1) Actually write out a speech and practice it, even if you think you have no chance, and no, it’s not bad luck, what’s bad luck is getting up there and saying something you’ll regret. 2) Make separate afterparty plans with friends, in the likely event that you don’t win. Meaning: Get out of there pretty fast, go to the restaurant where you have reservations, and relax with people who love you. Because if you stay at the party, you’ll have people coming up to you all night with tragic pity on their faces, saying, “I am so sorry you didn’t win.” And you might have been feeling great, happy for the winner, so thrilled to have been a finalist, but these people are going to bum you out. Get out of there.”

There is more on Rebercca Makkai’s substack if you’re interested: https://rebeccamakkai.substack.com/p/book-prizes-dont-work-how-you-think

Can Men Take the Female POV on Sex?

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There is an article in the Telegraph on 14 May 2026 in which Claire Allfree interviews Francis Spufford about his latest book.

Claire Allfree is an arts journalist. She writes regular book reviews for The Times and for The Telegraph.

Claire says, “Francis Spufford is in danger of choking on his ginger beer. We’re sitting on the outdoor terrace at Soho House, and I’ve asked him about the vast quantities of sex that feature in his latest novel Nonesuch. A lavishly imagined speculative history, it depicts a Blitz-eviscerated London under threat from an occult Nazi plot to assassinate Winston Churchill, and is told from the point of view of Iris, a 23-year-old female clerk with a weakness for “handsome idiots”. An older male novelist, writing enthusiastic sex scenes from the perspective of a younger woman? Quelle horreur.

“I’m very aware of the possibilities of falling into umpteen varieties of creepiness or tawdriness,” Spufford agrees. “I’m a balding 62-year-old man.” It’s a warm day, but beneath his trademark kente cap, he’s starting to blush. “I read John Updike’s [famously lusty] Couples while I was writing Nonesuch, to see if I could learn anything from it. Instead I realised why David Foster Wallace described Updike as ‘a penis with a thesaurus’. It’s not because men are inevitably doomed writing sex. It’s because of the way Updike wrote about it.”

UK author Francis Spufford
Author Francis Spufford’s latest novel Nonesuch is told from the point of view of Iris, a 23-year-old female clerk with a weakness for ‘handsome idiots’ Credit: Andrew Crowley for The Telegraph

Francis Spufford is in danger of choking on his ginger beer. We’re sitting on the outdoor terrace at Soho House, and I’ve asked him about the vast quantities of sex that feature in his latest novel Nonesuch. A lavishly imagined speculative history, it depicts a Blitz-eviscerated London under threat from an occult Nazi plot to assassinate Winston Churchill, and is told from the point of view of Iris, a 23-year-old female clerk with a weakness for “handsome idiots”. An older male novelist, writing enthusiastic sex scenes from the perspective of a younger woman? Quelle horreur.

“I’m very aware of the possibilities of falling into umpteen varieties of creepiness or tawdriness,” Spufford agrees. “I’m a balding 62-year-old man.” It’s a warm day, but beneath his trademark kente cap, he’s starting to blush. “I read John Updike’s [famously lusty] Couples while I was writing Nonesuch, to see if I could learn anything from it. Instead I realised why David Foster Wallace described Updike as ‘a penis with a thesaurus’. It’s not because men are inevitably doomed writing sex. It’s because of the way Updike wrote about it.”

“I had rules,” Spufford continues gamely. “I only wrote through Iris’s gaze. I still don’t know what Iris looks like – I do have a good idea of what her boyfriend Greg’s naked body looks like.”

Where does he stand on the argument that male writers ought not to write from the perspective of a woman at all? “I think that literature is f—ed if we can’t do a point of view that is remote from that of the author. It may go wrong, but the risk of it going horribly wrong is one of the risks that literature needs to take. We should simply work very hard when we do it.”

Spufford is known as one of Britain’s most idiosyncratic and delightfully daring writers. Where other contemporary novelists are constrained by the rigours of social realism, Spufford riffs on genre and subject with dazzling ease. He reinvigorated period fiction with his Costa-winning debut, the delectable caper Golden Hill (2016), while in his Booker-nominated Light Perpetual (2021), he played with metaphysics to restore life to five London children killed in 1944 by a V2 bomb

Nonesuch, published earlier this year, is Spufford’s first venture into fantasy. I normally struggle to accept angels in fiction, but Spufford’s phantasmagoric descriptions of a war-shattered London that’s haunted by, among others, the spirit Raphael, are intoxicating. It also features fascistic demonic orders, elusive shape-shifting monsters and time-travel mechanisms.

“I wanted to write about the Blitz,” he says, “without resorting to stereotypes. The unearthliness of fantasy brought out the unearthliness of the Blitz in ways that [complemented] the sense that an absolutely literal clash of good and evil was taking place at that historical moment.”

Spufford is a practising Christian, and is married to the Dean of Chelmsford, Jessica Martin. Having grown up an atheist, he came to the faith during his 30s, following what he had previously termed “a classic male f—-up” (the nature of which he has always refused to discuss). “My belief can’t help but be in my novels,” he says, “because something as fundamental as [faith] colours your basic understanding of what human beings are. But I feel very strongly that my books need to work for [everyone].”

On one level, Nonesuch is a critical response to CS Lewis’s allegorical Chronicles of Narnia. Iris, for instance, is a sexually confident, modern incarnation of poor Susan Pevensie, whom Lewis notoriously bars from Narnia in the final book because of her interest in “nylons and lipstick”. Spufford adores Lewis, but on this point, he demurs. “It’s hard not to think that the way Lewis denies Susan the happy ending stems from a certain bachelor misogyny. People have worked so hard to find another excuse for Lewis, but that’s kind of what it is. So I wanted to speak up for Susan.”

A few years ago, he even wrote a sequel to The Magician’s Nephew. It was, he said, “for the pleasure of my 10-year-old self, who longed for there to be one more Chronicle”. Alas, the Lewis estate has taken umbrage and the book remains unpublished, mired in legal difficulties. “I have hopes that – especially if the [2027] Greta Gerwig film adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew does well – there may yet be a chance of a rethink. And if not, the books go out of copyright in the UK in 2034.”

Spufford is also chairman of judges for the Tadeusz Bradecki Prize, which will be awarded on May 20 to an imaginative book “in which story-telling, fiction and non-fiction writing combine in an original and exciting way”. Set up last year, the prize is named in honour of the late Polish theatre director and writer, whom Spufford describes as a “Tristram Shandy-loving, Stanisław Lem-reading, pulp science fiction aficionado”. The six shortlisted books resist easy classification: they rove between imagined documentary, essayistic fiction and what Spufford calls a “fascinatingly odd” memoir of Albanian history. He adds that at least two of the entries are “nothing like anything British culture has produced in the last 30 years”.

Spufford was himself a form-busting non-fiction writer, and only turned to fiction relatively late, in his 50s. Does he think modern British non-fiction – which has suffered an alarming drop in sales in recent years – lacks daring? (Only two of the shortlisted authors, Olivia Laing and Thea Lenarduzzi, are even partly British, and three of the five books are published by small independent houses.)

“I’m too old to believe that what’s happening in publishing now says anything definitive about what publishers want or where the culture is going,” he says diplomatically. “But I don’t really believe that there is a mass of fabulous stuff out there that doesn’t make it in because of [risk-averse] gatekeepers. I think that some things are fashionable sometimes and other things are fashionable at other times, but that the good stuff always makes its way out.

“I’m also sceptical about the idea that something has to be universally celebrated,” he adds. “Maybe things only need to find their right nook and cranny to thrive in.”

What does keep Spufford up at night is AI. “It’s not just our growing attention-deficit problem. There is also, coming down the line, a major prose-production problem. You can’t become a superlative writer without having first been a crap and imitative one. You only learn how to be good after however many hours of practice. The idea that AI can mechanise the production of the mediocre, and still produce people who can do the excellent and the marvellous is an illusion – a writer has to pass through the mediocre in order to get to the marvellous.

“But why would people do that if  AI can do that for them? I’m afraid I predict that literature will be destroyed by dribbling morons in about 15 years.”

I tell him that many people fear the same. He compares AI to “the writing machines in the basement of the Ministry in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which produce an unending diet of porn, romances and adventure stories. For me, there’s hope in the fact that people like Jack Reacher novels, because nobody else has offered the idea of a huge, burly, ultra-violent protector in the way Lee Child has”.”

Writing the Book You Want to Rewrite

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Beth Kander is interviewed by Robert Lee Brewer Writer’s Digest (published 12 December 2024) on how she entered a competition at the last minute.

Beth Kander is a novelist and playwright with tangled roots in the Midwest and Deep South. The granddaughter of immigrants, her writing explores how worlds old and new intertwine—or collide. Her work has been described as “riveting,” “emotional,” “expertly crafted,” and “habit-forming.” Expect twists, turns, and secrets, with surprising heart and humor. Beth has too many degrees and drinks too much coffee. Her favorite characters are her dashing husband and their two lovely kids.

Beth Kander

What prompted you to write this book?

This book definitely has a non-traditional origin. I was knee deep in another project when a friend texted to let me know that the pop culture site Hey Alma was having a Hanukkah movie pitch competition. Eager to procrastinate on my existing project, I checked the pitch competition deadline—and found out it was the very next day. Long story short (literally), I threw together a pitch for I Made It Out Of Clay, a quirky romcom-with-a-golem concept, submitted it at the 11th hour, and ultimately won the competition.

Industry folks started reaching out to me to inquire about film rights. My literary agent, Alli, passed along some great advice from a film agent colleague: “Write the book first, not the movie.” So, I set aside my other book projects and prioritized writing this novel. The story immediately provided myriad unconventional opportunities to explore big topics: grief and family dynamics and identity and adult friendships and turning 40 … I got to write about these heavy things while laughing and making monsters. What a gift.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

I won the pitch competition in December 2022. I was so inspired, I drafted the novel in two blurry months. My agent took it out on sub in February 2023. It sold at auction in March 2023, and publication was set for December 2024. So all told, a two-year-process from idea to publication. That’s fast—often, the writing alone can take longer than that! I’m grateful that although the acquisition happened fast, I had a great editor and plenty of time to revise the book, several times over. I loved spending the time really developing the story and connecting with each character.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

I’ve learned so much in the process of publishing this book that it’s honestly hard to even know where to begin, and there have been plenty of surprises along the way. But if I had to pull out the biggest lesson, it’s this: You just never know.

You can spend years working on a story you really believe in, only to have it languish and eventually fade away. You can have an overnight idea that becomes the story everyone’s eager to read. You can’t trust trends or tricks. You just have to keep trying. I think a lot about this two-panel meme, where the first panel is labeled “what people think success looks like” and shows an arrow moving steadily forward and up, and the second panel is labeled “what success actually looks like” and it shows a tangled mess that a forward-facing arrow finally re-emerges from… which feels relevant to the publishing process. But I’ve been over-the-top lucky to work with my agent, Alli, to navigate every detour along the way. And working on I Made It Out Of Clay with my editor, April, and the team at Mira/HarperCollins, has been a delight. Sometimes, gracefully and gratefully, the puzzle pieces slide into place.

You just never know.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

This was the fastest writing process I’ve ever undertaken. To go from a paragraph-long idea to a 90,000-word novel in two months is… well, not something I’d necessarily recommend, honestly. Thank God for coffee.

But what I realized is that I didn’t speed-write this book in a vacuum; it wasn’t an anomaly, or a fluke. It was a culmination. All those years, all those other stories; that was my training for this manuscript-marathon. I doubt I’ll keep that pace up with many subsequent projects, but I’m definitely holding fast to the lesson that even the projects that don’t pan out help shape the ones that will fly.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

There’s so much I hope that readers will get out of this book—catharsis, cackling-laughter, genuine enjoyment, a sense of release. There’s some strange stuff in the story (an actual monster!) but it’s really rooted in characters that I hope are relatable in all their imperfections and deep desires for something better. Most of all, I hope this book gives readers permission to laugh in the midst of sorrow or acknowledge sadness even as they dance for joy; to let complicated, conflicting emotions exist alongside each other on the page and in our lives. The publication of this book intersected with a profound loss in my own life, and I’ve become so grateful for anyone and anything that acknowledges that we can feel many things at once. If readers come away with that affirmation, I’ll be thrilled.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Write the book you want to rewrite—because most of writing is revising! Don’t agonize over every word in a first draft; that will only slow you down. Just write the story. Get it onto the page. Drafting is the stage where you capture the idea. Revising is where you figure out how to really tell the story well.

A Last Minute Win

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Beth Kander has an article on Writers Digest website dated 12 December 2024, about how she entered a writing contest at the last minute an won more than the contest!

Beth Kander

Beth Kander is a novelist and playwright with tangled roots in the Midwest and Deep South. The granddaughter of immigrants, her writing explores how worlds old and new intertwine—or collide. Her work has been described as “riveting,” “emotional,” “expertly crafted,” and “habit-forming.” Expect twists, turns, and secrets, with surprising heart and humor. Beth has too many degrees and drinks too much coffee. Her favorite characters are her dashing husband and their two lovely kids.

She says, “This book definitely has a non-traditional origin. I was knee deep in another project when a friend texted to let me know that the pop culture site Hey Alma was having a Hanukkah movie pitch competition. Eager to procrastinate on my existing project, I checked the pitch competition deadline—and found out it was the very next day. Long story short (literally), I threw together a pitch for I Made It Out Of Clay, a quirky romcom-with-a-golem concept, submitted it at the 11th hour, and ultimately won the competition.

Industry folks started reaching out to me to inquire about film rights. My literary agent, Alli, passed along some great advice from a film agent colleague: “Write the book first, not the movie.” So, I set aside my other book projects and prioritized writing this novel. The story immediately provided myriad unconventional opportunities to explore big topics: grief and family dynamics and identity and adult friendships and turning 40 … I got to write about these heavy things while laughing and making monsters. What a gift.

I won the pitch competition in December 2022. I was so inspired, I drafted the novel in two blurry months. My agent took it out on sub in February 2023. It sold at auction in March 2023, and publication was set for December 2024. So all told, a two-year-process from idea to publication. That’s fast—often, the writing alone can take longer than that! I’m grateful that although the acquisition happened fast, I had a great editor and plenty of time to revise the book, several times over. I loved spending the time really developing the story and connecting with each character.

I’ve learned so much in the process of publishing this book that it’s honestly hard to even know where to begin, and there have been plenty of surprises along the way. But if I had to pull out the biggest lesson, it’s this: You just never know.

You can spend years working on a story you really believe in, only to have it languish and eventually fade away. You can have an overnight idea that becomes the story everyone’s eager to read. You can’t trust trends or tricks. You just have to keep trying. I think a lot about this two-panel meme, where the first panel is labeled “what people think success looks like” and shows an arrow moving steadily forward and up, and the second panel is labeled “what success actually looks like” and it shows a tangled mess that a forward-facing arrow finally re-emerges from… which feels relevant to the publishing process. But I’ve been over-the-top lucky to work with my agent, Alli, to navigate every detour along the way. And working on I Made It Out Of Clay with my editor, April, and the team at Mira/HarperCollins, has been a delight. Sometimes, gracefully and gratefully, the puzzle pieces slide into place.

You just never know.

This was the fastest writing process I’ve ever undertaken. To go from a paragraph-long idea to a 90,000-word novel in two months is… well, not something I’d necessarily recommend, honestly. Thank God for coffee.

But what I realized is that I didn’t speed-write this book in a vacuum; it wasn’t an anomaly, or a fluke. It was a culmination. All those years, all those other stories; that was my training for this manuscript-marathon. I doubt I’ll keep that pace up with many subsequent projects, but I’m definitely holding fast to the lesson that even the projects that don’t pan out help shape the ones that will fly.

There’s so much I hope that readers will get out of this book—catharsis, cackling-laughter, genuine enjoyment, a sense of release. There’s some strange stuff in the story (an actual monster!) but it’s really rooted in characters that I hope are relatable in all their imperfections and deep desires for something better. Most of all, I hope this book gives readers permission to laugh in the midst of sorrow or acknowledge sadness even as they dance for joy; to let complicated, conflicting emotions exist alongside each other on the page and in our lives. The publication of this book intersected with a profound loss in my own life, and I’ve become so grateful for anyone and anything that acknowledges that we can feel many things at once. If readers come away with that affirmation, I’ll be thrilled.

Write the book you want to rewrite—because most of writing is revising! Don’t agonize over every word in a first draft; that will only slow you down. Just write the story. Get it onto the page. Drafting is the stage where you capture the idea. Revising is where you figure out how to really tell the story well.”

Slow Writers

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Lauren Alwan has an article on The Millions website dated two days ago in which she discusses the virtues of being a slow writer.

Lauren’s fiction and essays have appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, The Bellevue Literary Review, Story Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Catapult, The Millions, World Literature Today, Alta Journal, and other publications. Her work is included in the anthology AMap Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family and the Meaning of Home (ed. Nicole Chung and Mensah Demary). She is the recipient of a First Pages Prize from the de Groot Foundation, the Bellevue Literary Review’s Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, and a citation of Notable in Best American Essays.

Lauren Alwan

“As a writer at work on a book that’s taken far longer than expected—a story collection begun in 2008 now a novel in-progress—I’m interested in how, in a world that values speed, the slow writer learns to tolerate the uncertainty that comes with the long project. Is it possible to tune out the noise of doubt and the proverbial ticking clock when writing goes into overtime? Having lost count of my revisions, and in need of advice, I went looking for other slow writers and discovered that more often than not, a book’s gestation takes place over years, frequently decades. I found too that the slow writer embraces the protracted and unpredictable timeline, seeing it not as fraught or frustrating but an opportunity for openness and discovery. As J.R.R Tolkien said to W. H. Auden, on the 12 years he spent writing Lord of the Rings, “I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me.”

The world can be impatient with slow writers. Nearly a decade after Jeffrey Eugenides published Middlesex, Dwight Garner wrote in The New York Times, “It has been a long, lonely vigil. We’d nearly forgotten he was out there.” Garner’s2011 article, “Dear Important Novelists: Be Less Like Moses and More Like Howard Cosell,” argues the “long gestation period” among the period’s young writers (Middlesex was written over nine) marks “a desalinating tidal change in the place novelists occupy in our culturre.” The writer, hidden away in monkish solitude, is no longer a commentator on events of the moment in the vein of, say, Saul Bellow. Bellow wrote four massive books in 11 years, and in doing so, Garner says, “snatched control, with piratical confidence and a throbbing id, of American literature’s hive mind.” Comparing Eugenides’s books, he notes, “So much time elapses between them that his image in dust-jacket photographs can change alarmingly.” Write slowly and not only do you risk being forgotten, you may no longer be recognizable.

Books known for their protracted writing time—10, 20 years or more—span genre, length, and era. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, 10 years. Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, 28 years—and 11 for her debut, I Free Food for Millionaires Edward P. Jones imagined The Known World in his head for over a decade before writing it out in seven months, and John Steinbeck made notes for East of Eden for 11 years before writing it in a year of continual work.

Still, there are those writers who seem to work best at a clip. Anne Rice wrote Interview with a Vampire  in five weeks and Muriel Spark The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in less than four. Kazuo Ishiguro drafted The Remains of the Day in four weeks—achieved, he’s said, by implementing a process he calls The Crash: “do nothing but write from 9am to 10.30pm, Monday through Saturday. […] One hour off for lunch and two for dinner. I’d not see, let alone answer, any mail, and would not go near the phone.”

Donna Tartt, known for long intervals between books, gets through on faith in the process. The Secret History was written over a decade, and The Little Friend appeared 10 years later. Of the 11 years Tartt spent on The Goldfinch (Garner describes the author during this time as “vanished”), she’s said, “Things will come to you and you’re not going to know exactly how they fit in. You have to trust in the way they all fit together, that your subconscious knows what you’re doing.”

Min Jin Lee has described the 28 years spent writing Pachinko—beginning with the novel’s inception during her student days at Yale to publication in 2017—as “far too long.” It wasn’t until years into the novel’s writing that the project took a turn. During a four-year stay in Japan, after interviewing Japanese Koreans in Osaka, Lee came to realize she’d “been wrong about everything,” and soon after rewrote the manuscript from the beginning. “I was so impressed by the breadth and complexity of the people I met in Japan,” she said, “that I had to start the book again in 2008, and I continued to write it and revise it until the sale of the manuscript in 2015.”

The writer engaged in the long project hopes for such turns of luck, and wanting to know firsthand how luck and persistence inform the long project, I turned to writers I know, hoping for advice on how to tune out my own questioning and cultivate a next-level order of patience.

John Huddleston, photographer and professor emeritus at Middlebury College, is the author of four books—hybrid works of text and image that examine time, history, and place. Killing Ground: The Civil War and the Changing American Landscape (2003), is the product of 15 years of travel and research, and pairs historical photographs of Civil War battle sites with contemporary photos of the same locations. Healing Ground: Walking the Farms if Vermont (2011), and At Home in the Northern Forest: Photographs of the Changing Vermont Landscape (2020) each took a decade, as Huddleston says, “to better understand what I was seeing.” His current project, an interrogation of Mexico’s religious sites and his own Catholicism—has run nearly 50 years. How does he pace himself? “I think the long periods of constructing my books have engendered a maturity in the editing and printing of images,” he says. “A more nuanced and interesting perspective develops with time.”

Drue Heinz prizewinner Leslie Pietrzyk, the author of This Angel on My Chest (2015), believes in staying open to change: “My advice is to remain flexible. Perhaps my greatest ‘being flexible’ moment was working on what I imagined was a novel about a political family for two and a half years, abandoning it, and picking it up again four years later.” She repurposed much of that material, including random and forgotten prompt pieces, into her most recent collection, Admit This to No One (2021), linked stories about power in Washington, DC.

Poet, essayist, and Fulbright fellow Natasha Saje’s five books include The Future Will Call You Something Else (2023), a book of criticism, Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory (2014), and a memoir-in-essays, Terroir (2020). Windows and Doors was written over 16 years, and Terroir, 10. A self-professed feedback junkie, she seeks out frank, even harsh readers. “There’s always some truth in what they don’t like,” she says, and then revises extensively, as she puts it, “like a maniac.”

Thaïs Miller wrote her first two books in less than a year and published both before she was 21. The author of Our Machinery (2008) and The Subconscious Mutiny and Other Stories (2009), Miller says of those early quicksilver efforts, “Beginner’s luck is an understatement.” Currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing, her dissertation includes a novel begun in 2009, one that’s still finding its shape. These days, Samuel Beckett’s words, “Fail better,” are pinned on a board above her desk, a reminder that “writers are always failing to achieve a perfectionist ideal. […] These words let me off the hook and enable me to experiment and play with my work, to try out new things.”

How, amid doubt, does a writer keep focus, and pace herself over years, even decades? Saje says, “I write and then get pieces published, which gives me confidence that there will be readers for the book.” Pietryzk writes prompts around her novel’s characters and settings and the material often becomes short stories she publishes in literary journals. For Huddleston, over time the work “integrates into the self, into one’s life. I generally work intensely until I can’t stand it anymore, let the work sit, then repeat. If I have a particular problem I’ll often hold it in mind without actively thinking about it.”

This immersion over years, or decades, what George Saunders calls “rigorous, iterative engagement,” can be fruitful, but it can also make a book’s endpoint more difficult to see. Huddleston’s 50-year project, which is nearing completion, has in the end surprised him. “I’ve returned to the project many times after feeling it was done,” he says, and in doing so, encountered an unexpected complication: wishing the work could go on. Similarly, Vauhini Vara, author of The Immortal King Rao (2022), says of the 13 years it took to write her debut novel, “On some level I wanted to keep spending time with it, finding its unexplored corners, tunneling into its wormholes. I didn’t want to let it go.”

So—know when to let go, keep faith in the process, be flexible, fail better, and whenever possible, stay astonished. Though perhaps most importantly, recognize the value that comes with the passing of time itself. In The Art of Slow Writing: Reflections of Time, Craft and Creativity, essayist Louise DeSalvo writes, “We’ve internalized the idea that that the only actions worth taking are those that can be accomplished quickly, […] that if our writing takes so long, we might not be cut out for the writing life.” The Art of Slow Writing is a manifesto for giving a book the time it needs, for cultivating patience and connection. DeSalvo describes, among other things, the challenge of “not knowing how long a book will take, and being comfortable with not knowing.”

Of Jeffrey Eugenides’s slow pace, DeSalvo writes that he “works with rather than against the fact that his books take long to write.” The years writing Middlesex, she notes, saw both the death of his father and the birth of his daughter, and over time these significant life events led to preoccupations with family history and genetic discourse that found their way into the book: “He wanted the novel to respond to those changes as he worked.” This synergy can blur the line between life and art and make completing a long project its own challenge. But as DeSalvo observes, finishing isn’t really the end if “we see our writing life as a continuum,” a larger process that connects each project, whether short or long, within the learned experience of the writer’s practice.

And as DeSalvo notes, there’s always the next book.”

AI Wins Prize

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An article in today’s RTÉ website titled: “Japan literary laureate unashamed about using ChatGPT” caught my eye. There is no author contribution shown.

“The winner of Japan’s most prestigious literary award has acknowledged that about “5%” of her futuristic novel was penned by ChatGPT, saying generative AI had helped unlock her potential.

Since the 2022 launch of ChatGPT, an easy-to-use AI chatbot that can deliver an essay upon request within seconds, there have been growing worries about the impact on a range of sectors – books included.

Lauded by a judge for being “almost flawless” and “universally enjoyable”, Rie Kudan’s latest novel, “Tokyo-to Dojo-to” (“Sympathy Tower Tokyo”), claimed the biannual Akutagawa Prize yesterday.

Set in a futuristic Tokyo, the book revolves around a high-rise prison tower and its architect’s intolerance of criminals, with AI a recurring theme.

The 33-year-old author openly admitted that AI heavily influenced her writing process as well.

“I made active use of generative AI like ChatGPT in writing this book,” she told a ceremony following the winner’s announcement.

“I would say about 5% of the book quoted verbatim the sentences generated by AI.”

Outside of her creative activity, Ms Kudan said she frequently toys with AI, confiding her innermost thoughts that “I can never talk to anyone else about”.

ChatGPT’s responses sometimes inspired dialogue in the novel, she added.

Going forward, she said she wants to keep “good relationships” with AI and “unleash my creativity” in co-existence with it.

When contacted by AFP, the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Literature, the Akutagawa award’s organiser, declined to comment.

On social media, opinions were divided on Ms Kudan’s unorthodox approach to writing, with sceptics calling it morally questionable and potentially undeserving of the prize.

“So she wrote the book by deftly using AI … Is that talented or not? I don’t know,” one wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

But others celebrated her resourcefulness and the effort she put into experimenting with various prompts.

“So this is how the Akutagawa laureate uses ChatGPT – not to slack off but to ‘unleash creativity'”, another social media user wrote.

Titles that list ChatGPT as a co-author have been offered for sale through Amazon’s e-book self-publishing unit, although critics say the works are of poor quality.

British author Salman Rushdie told a press conference at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October that recently someone asked an AI writing tool to produce 300 words in his style.

“And what came out was pure garbage,” said the “Midnight’s Children” writer, to laughter from the audience.

The technology also throws up a host of potential legal problems.

Last year, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and “Game of Thrones” author George RR Martin were among several writers who filed a class-action lawsuit against ChatGPT creator OpenAI over alleged copyright violation.

Along with the Authors Guild, they accused the California-based company of using their books “without permission” to train ChatGPT’s large language models, algorithms capable of producing human-sounding text responses based on simple queries, according to the lawsuit.”

From my point of view, the use of AI to produce literature must sort out the copyright problem. When that issue has been resolved, using AI to write, or co-write, books will be accepted as commonplace, legal and ethical. We human beings have always adopted new technology, even dangerous technology, having found the good in it.

Judging a Literary Award

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The Reader Views Blog has an article by Sheri Hoyte, Managing Editor, regarding the process of scoring titles for the Reader Views Reviewers Choice Literary Awards.  Sheri Hoyte’s website says that she is an aspiring children’s picture book author.  “I worked in the corporate world for over thirty years, honing my business and professional writing skills until 2012, when my passion for stories called me home to Reader Views an online publicity company for authors. Over the next couple of years I read and reviewed books for Reader Views, becoming the editor and social media manager in 2014. I am now one of the managing editors.”

Sheri Hoyte

In the blog she says: “So what do judges look for when scoring a literary awards title? Much like reading with a writer’s hat on, reading with a judge’s hat takes a different focus. Following are the guidelines I use when judging a literary awards title:

·         Content.  Does the author’s voice convey a distinct and consistent style throughout?  Does the flow of the book draw the reader in at an appropriate pace?  Does the reader have a clear understanding of who the characters are in the story?

·         Presentation and Design.  There is nothing more distracting to a great story than editing and proofreading errors.  This is the easiest thing to fix or prevent in the first place.  I can tell within the first few pages whether or not a professional editor has been used.  An occasional typo won’t make or break the book, but consistent use of poor grammar will cost points in the presentation category.

·         Production Quality.   Is the cover attractive and appropriate for the genre and the story?  Yes, I know the cliché, but a dull and drab cover, or a noisy cover with hidden titles and too much information can be a turn off.  Does the binding fall apart when opening the book?  Is the paper quality adequate or just so-so?  I have a hard time concentrating on a story when the book I’m reading is falling apart or the pages are tearing because the paper is so thin.

·         Innovation.  To stand out in any genre, innovation is the key.  Is the subject matter original?  Does the author bring a fresh voice to the genre?   Are writing elements being used in interesting and creative ways?

·          Social Relevance and Enjoyment.  For fiction books: Is the book impactful on the community of the genre?  Is it reflective of important social issues? Is it highly entertaining and completely engrossing?  Would I re-read this book?  Was I left wanting more?

·         Resourcefulness.   For self-help, business, how-to, etc. type of books: Is the book easy to follow, clear and concise? Are credible sources noted? Does the author have credibility in the subject matter?

When I read a book, whether for pure enjoyment, to learn a new skill, expand my knowledge, or for a literary contest, I want to feel a connection to that book.  Fiction or non-fiction, humorous or biographical, when I’ve finished a book and it lingers in my mind for days – that is the sign of greatness.

We Need to Talk About Children’s Books in a Grown Up Way

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There was an article in the Evening Standard on 28 January with the above title written by Katie Law, an ES journalist, covering the views of Lauren Child, the best-selling author-illustrator and current Children’s Laureate, on the problems faced by children’s books.

Lauren Child

Law says: “Lauren Child thinks children’s book publishing still gets a bad deal. It’s one of the reasons she is so happy to be a judge for this year’s Oscar’s Book Prize ‘There’s still a lot of snootiness about children’s books. Just look at the teeny-weeny percentage that get reviewed compared to adults. It’s as if there’s a kind of hierarchy.’

“Child is best known for her books featuring Clarice Bean, Charlie and Lola (who became a TV series), Ruby Redfort and Hubert Horatio, which together have sold more than five million copies worldwide. In the two decades since we first met quirky, snub-nosed Clarice Bean and her chaotic, trendy family, her legions of original fans have become adults. ‘The most touching experience in my whole career is talking to grown-ups who tell me what the book meant to them when they were growing up,’ says Child, 53. ‘It’s why I’m so passionate about the idea that children’s book writing and illustrating should get more recognition, and why prizes like Oscar’s Book Prize are so important, because there is so little coverage. We know that a child’s life can be changed by what they read, so why don’t we spend more time thinking about what that material is?’

“Pippi Longstocking, Mary Poppins and The Secret Garden — all of which she has illustrated — were the books that had the most profound effect on Child when she was growing up. ‘The Secret Garden was a gamechanger because it was about someone who was so hard to like. She was plain, had a horrible expression on her face, was bossy and ungrateful. As a child I felt like her, I felt all of those things. I felt it was me. So for children who might think bad things about themselves, these stories can help let them off the hook. It’s all a drip-drip effect, which is why it’s important we talk about children’s books in a grown-up way, in terms of what they’re about, rather than just saying ‘Isn’t it lovely?’

Clarice Bean

“Ms Child says: ‘We’re great at giving prizes for unusual adults’ books but not so good at praising people who have different ideas about children’s books; things need to be a bit more extraordinary.’ Her own trajectory is a great example: Clarice Bean only took off when she stopped trying to please her publishers. ‘I was young and kept trying to do what they wanted and getting it wrong, so every time I rewrote or redrew something, it would get more dead. It had none of me in it, so quite rightly they rejected it. I actually started writing Clarice Bean as a film and forgot about all the things you need to make a book, and that’s when the publishers suddenly became interested. It’s about the need to reject everything you think they want and find your own voice.’

“The National Literacy Trust finds that one in 11 children and young people in the UK don’t own a book (a figure that rises to one in eight children on free school meals), and that book ownership is one of the highest predictors of reading attainment and mental well-being.

“Child grew up in Wiltshire in a happy family not unlike Clarice Bean’s. Today she lives in north London with her partner, criminal barrister Adrian Darbishire, and their daughter Tuesday, now nearly nine, whom she adopted from Mongolia at the age of two-and-a-half after visiting the country as part of a Unesco project.  ‘Having Tuesday doesn’t change the way I write or illustrate but it does make me see more than ever how important illustration is. We had no common language when she arrived. But we did have drawing, and she was a natural right from the start, which really helped us communicate. It’s important for children that their drawings are looked at and that it has a wide role in education because it’s about learning to observe and understand, just like creative writing, and having these skills can make you much more empathetic.'”

I particularly agree with what Ms Child says about book publishers: they don’t know what they want, but when they find something eclectic that is well-written and full of the author’s passion, they go for it.

 

Bookshops: A Retail Bright Spot

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Margareta Pagano’s article in the December 12th issue of the Evening Standard contained welcome news, ending with this: “But the best news of all is that people are buying books again in physical book shops, rather than on line with Amazon.  It’s difficult to get accurate figures, but there is a definite shift back to bricks and mortar: Waterstones, which bought Foyles earlier this year, is making excellent profits and opening new stores again.  And, for the first time in years, there are more new opening of book shops this year than closures.”

ResPublica says about Ms Pagano. “(She) is a columnist and the Independent and the Independent on Sunday. She is one of the UK’s leading financial journalists and has worked for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph, the Times and the Sunday Times. A founding editor of the Financial News, Margareta helped turn this specialist newspaper into one of the City’s premier online news services which is now part of Dow Jones. She also writes for the Spectator and the First Post and appears on TV as a financial commentator.”

Margareta Pagano

The article begins: ” . . . here’s as safe bet; you are going to buy or receive from someone in your family either Michelle Obama’s autobiography, Becoming, or The Ice Monster, by David Williams and Illustrated by Tony Ross. . . . To date, Obama’s Becoming is the fastest-selling, hardback, non-fiction title in the UK since Alex Ferguson’s My Autobiography published five ears ago. . . . It is being gobbled up by women of all ages around the country to give to their female friends and relatives.  They also reckon that with two million copies of Obama’s book having been sold worldwide more or less at the full price, Penguin Random House may be close to raking back much of the enormous $65 million (£50 million) advance paid to the Obama couple for their books- the former president, whose biography is out next year, has a job on his hands to beat his wife’s record.

“Like in the jewellery business, December is the Holy Grail for the book trade with u to 40% of all fiction and non-fiction books sold in the Christmas month.

“The latest figures from Nielsen BookScan show that sales for the year up to December 1 are 1.3% up on the year before at £1.3 billion, although volume sales are down a smidgen.  This is still along way off its pre-crash heyday, when sales between 2006 and 2007 hit a record £1.9 billion.  But Tom Tivnan of The Bookseller says the industry is going through a renaissance and reckons that sales this year could be a\s high as £1.6 billion after Christmas is taken into account.

“What is driving this revival? Fewer retailers are discounting prices, digital has opened up new markets and book shops have woken up to the need to host live events with authors and other experiences to attract readers.  Growth is most marked in the childrens’ books market and in audiobooks.  Audiobook sales are up 20% year on year and have created a new market, notably among men aged between 25 and 45, a demographic that traditionally reads the least.  In an era when time is short and the mood troubled, readers are also pouncing on ‘smart thinking’ books and authors who stir debate. That’s quite a contrast to the Ladybird books and adult colouring books which did so well after the crash.”

On a personal note, I should mention that Achieving Superpersonhood: Three East African Lives has been named winner in the Novel category, Pinnacle Book Achievement Awards, 2018.