The Guardian's Blog, page 122

How Josephine Pullein-Thompson's pony tales carried away young readers

The remarkable author, who has died aged 90, wrote nearly 50 children's books that transported me as a child. How about you?
Obituary: Josephine Pullein-Thompson

Many of my childhood summer half-terms were spent on an old farm in Somerset, where the shelves were packed with pony books the majority of them by the Pullein-Thompson sisters. The news that Josephine Pullein-Thompson has died at the age of 90 has sent me catapulting back to those days of dusty novels and reading in the sunshine and desperately wanting a pony of my own.

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Poem of the week: Silence by Lotte Kramer

The quiet pastoral of a river scene carries strong undercurrents of traumatic historical memory

A footnote to this week's poem by Lotte Kramer (published in The Rialto, No. 80, Spring-Summer 2014) tells us that the poet "is a survivor of that small exodus of children organised by the kindertransport movement in the 1930s".

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Wimbledon players can be faulted for their reading habits

The upper echelons of the sport's elite display little taste for high culture

Wimbledon begins this week, and the prospect of a champion who champions reading seems as remote as ever. Martin Amis, Geoff Dyer, Sebastian Faulks, David Foster Wallace, Sophie Kinsella (as Madeleine Wickham), John le Carré and Lionel Shriver are among the novelists who've written about tennis, but their efforts have evidently made no impression on the sport's elite, who tend to cite YA fantasy fiction, Dan Brown or Paulo Coelho when asked to name a favourite book. On a video on YouTube in which top men's players dutifully pick a title apiece, Andy Murray, last year's winner, simply says: "I don't read, I haven't read a book since the second Harry Potter." His apparent phobia is shared by Stan Wawrinka ("I don't like to read books"), the world No 4; and unexpectedly by the ostensibly cultured No 3, Roger Federer written about by Le Carré and Foster Wallace, and the subject of a just-published book, Federer and Me, by Will Skidelsky, the Observer's former literary editor who says his print consumption is confined to "magazines and newspapers".

Slightly less dispiriting are the reading habits of the top two, as world No 1 Rafael Nadal has mentioned Isabel Allende's City of the Beasts and John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in interviews, and No 2 Novak Djokovic paid patriotic tribute to Ivo Andric (the Serbian, Nobel-prizewinning author of The Bridge Over the Drina) on Facebook on the 120th anniversary of his birth in 2012 although he also nodded elsewhere to The Hunger Games, which suggested something simpler is more likely to be his browse of choice.

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What the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered prize reveals

One of the pleasures of judging this award has been to train a spotlight on very good writers that don't tick marketing boxes
Gallery: Tintype portraits of the prize winners

On Thursday evening, I had the particular joy of standing in a large room and giving away £40,000 of someone else's money to eight authors. The authors, winners of this years Jerwood Fiction Uncovered prize, had little in common except they were all British, all non-debut writers and all deserving of more readers.

As chair of judges, I promise, whatever your literary predilections, there is at least one book here you will fall in love with. The list of winners includes young emerging talents Ben Brooks (Lolito) and Cynan Jones (The Dig), through to more established names such as Naomi Wood (Mrs Hemingway), Gerard Woodward (Vanishing) and Evie Wyld (All the Birds, Singing) who still haven't reached the level of public awareness they deserve. One of the authors I was happiest to have on the list was a writer once mentored by Hilary Mantel, Lesley Glaister (Little Egypt), whose varied list of publishers during her 13-book career tells its own story. The other books on the shortlist are Bernardine Evaristo's Mr Loverman and Gareth R Roberts's Whatever Happened to Billy Parks?.

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What would Stephen King do? A litmus test for life

Emily Schultz has taken Stephen King as her guide as she spends an unexpected windfall from her novel Joyland. But how could the master of horror help with your decision-making?

"Would Stephen King Like It?" That's the question author Emily Schultz has been asking, as she spends the unexpected money which landed in her account after fans of King mistakenly bought the ebook version of her 2006 novel Joyland, thinking it was the digital version of King's novel of the same name. King published his own Joyland last year, but only in print.

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Dame Hilary Mantel set to take another bite of royal family

Whichever royal is charged with the novelist's investiture can expect a very sharp assessment

The literary world rejoiced this week when Hilary Mantel was made a dame, not least because fiction writers still seem under-represented in the ranks of Dame Commanders of the British Empire (the double Booker prize winner will join AS Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Penelope Lively and Jacqueline Wilson, all bar Byatt added in recent years as if in sheepish awareness of the need to boost numbers).

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Play the literary World Cup: nominate your all-time top team

Which authors would form your literary XI? Penguin have created a literary World Cup and we're joining the fun. Nominate the writers you would pick, and explain which positions you would place them in. We will unveil the Guardian readers' definitive team soon

Everything is about football these days, so we're all trying to get a look-in - whether in fashion, music, film, food or (yes,really!) beards . Even things that have nothing to do with the beautiful game are "a thing" because of it.

In the books world, publishers Penguin have capitalised on the fact that according to a survey 37% of people who aren't interested in the World Cup turn to books to escape. They've cheekily launched their very own Penguin Cup: 16 teams, all formed by each country's all-time literary stars.

JD Salinger fails to turn up to training #penguincupnews

Tolstoy: Only 90 minutes ? Cant we make it ten hours? #penguincupnews

@PenguinUKBooks McEwan does not save ball. Writes book that makes up for not saving ball by saying he did, in fact, save it #penguincupnews

David Foster Wallace turns up to training in tennis whites, as if it's some sort of joke #penguincupnews

I'm supporting Brazil in the Penguin Cup. More here: http://t.co/PmjrQDO4K5 pic.twitter.com/kPn3nuRfdg

#leftwinger RT @paulmartinovic: Have you noticed you made the Nigerian Penguin Cup team? http://t.co/cdPGh734Zj pic.twitter.com/orEZf6HOXr

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Publishers jailed overnight in campaign for prisoners' right to read

Six publishers have volunteered for a night in the cells, fundraising for campaign against limits on prisoners' entitlement to books

There's more than one sort of porridge, as any lag would tell you. Profile Books publisher Andrew Franklin opted for the lumpier kind when he volunteered to spend a night in the cells this week with a Jeffrey Archer novel. He is one of six leading lights from the publishing world who will be banged up on Thursday night to raise money for the Howard League for Penal Reform's campaign against the recent ban on gifts of books to prisoners.

Pledges totalling £4,749.88 secured Franklin his overnight detention, alongside fellow publishers Jamie Byng (Canongate) and David Young (Hachette), agent Clare Conville, Society of Authors chair Anna Sebba and Polly Powell, CEO of Pavilion Books, which is hosting the overnight stay in disused police cells conveniently located beneath their London offices, in the old West London Magistrates' Court.

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David Mitchell's webchat: 10 things we learned

The author of Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet joined us live to answer your questions. From writers being 'nuts' to how he names his characters, here are the highlights

David Mitchell, author of novels including Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, twice shortlisted for the Booker prize and all-round fiction star, joined the Guardian's Reading group to answer your questions about his work, life, favourite books and the novels yet to be written. You can see all his answers below the line here, but here are 10 things we learned about him.

No disrespect to Tim Parks who I know is a very clever man, but I think the death of the novel/of architecture/of painting/of fashion/of the serious film/of theatre/of any art form has been confidently pronounced too often over too many decades for me to take such pronouncements too seriously.

Maybe I'm naive, but I think the first question literary agents and publishers are interested in is "Does this thing work?" I think taxing but rewarding books continue to be published and continue to find readerships.

Hi Angus.

Compression. I think my logic was that the "say" verb is already there in the speech marks, so I didn't need a communication verb. This is ignoring the (very) well-established convention that we need a verb like "say" as well, and doing so gives the prose a strangeness that, I guess, takes a bit of getting used to. Hopefully it won't put off too many readers.

Yes, there's a lot in a name, and a character isn't properly alive until he or she has been properly christened, which can take a long time God bless the Search and Replace function. You instinctively know the nuances and baggages of names from your own generation and culture, but if you stray further afield, you need expert help. I usually give my translator from the country I'm writing my requirements in terms of age and social class, and ask for a shortlist of five. I then choose one that has, as you say, an apt rhythm and sound, and that doesn't look too much like anyone else's name in the book. Better to avoid the Sauron/Saruman clash problem if possible.

Writers are partly nuts. Ask any of the poor so-and-sos who have to live with us.

Odd, isn't it, how some countries exercise an imaginative pull, while others simply don't? Japan did, and still does: familiarity hasn't weakened it. I could spend hundreds of words on this answer, but as time's short I'll just say that right now it's Iceland. My new novel (sorry if this sounds like a plug, it's not supposed to be) The Bone Clocks spends about 20 pages in Iceland, and the third novel on my "To Be Written" queue will probably spend half its time there.

Dear David,

I can't get my head around the fact that you're unusually good-looking for a male novelist. Why do you think that is?

Photoshop.

Yes, I was happy with the Cloud Atlas film, and feel an unearned pride about it. Some medium-sized changes had to be made, but I understood the logic behind the changes. I had very little artistic input, as all three directors are good writers, they didn't need my help, and they knew and know much more about scriptwriting than I do. I have a "stick to what you're best at" attitude.

The best thing about the film for me was the visa it gave me into the world of film-making. You find some fascinating tribes there.

I think it might be a bit unfair on a single work of fiction to put it on the thrown of the singularly superlative, but I did read Michel Faber's new one the other week, The Book of Strange New Things, and thought it was extraordinary. As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I'm still looking for the door.

Read Chekhov's short stories, if you haven't. That's the literary heaven of which I'm only a low-wattage version. And how I wish that last line was only false modesty.

Finishing the tetralogy still ranks as one of the most intense reading experiences of my life. I wandered down Queensway in Bayswater afterwards, feeling drunk, I still remember that hour.

Blimey. Being married to Victoria Coren has rather aged you.

oh the fun the other David Mitchell and I could have if we just swapped online identities for a few hours...

and the havoc.

Do you still have the Green Clarinet?

You've got me there, Steff -

Green Clarinet? Is this me or the other DM?
Was I drunk? Or is a secret codeword that has been redacted from my memory by a shadowy circle of psychosoterics?

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Haruki Murakami and the marketing madness of publishers

Murakami's new book will come with a free sticker set so (adult) readers can decorate the novel. Can you come up with a better or worse idea?

The honour for the most ludicrous marketing initiative of all time has to belong to the Stranglers' record company. It cooked up a plan to boost the profile of the band's famous hymn to heroin abuse, Golden Brown, with a giveaway of Breville Snack'n'Sandwich toasters. But publishing has provided some competition.

The latest contender comes in plans to herald the coming of the new Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. First editions of the novel, it was announced at midnight, will include a special sheet of stickers designed by five Japanese illustrators (shown above). 

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