The Guardian's Blog, page 140

Their type? The writers who fell for film stars

From Siegfried Sassoon and Ivor Novello to Gore Vidal and Fred Astaire, a surprisingly large number of writers have paired off with film stars

On Monday, a raunchy letter from Ernest Hemingway to Marlene Dietrich – a surreal fantasy about her, reflecting what he called an "unsynchronised passion" that endured for more than 25 years – is part of an online auction of Dietrich's possessions. Although their relationship remained platonic, many other authors did have movie-star lovers …

F Scott Fitzgerald – Lois Moran

Fitzgerald's affair in the 1920s with this Zelda lookalike, a silent screen actor who was 17 when he first met her, infuriated his wife – she once threw a jewellery gift from him out of a train window while raging about Moran – but inspired Dick Diver's romance with the actor Rosemary Hoyt in Tender Is the Night.

Siegfried Sassoon – Ivor Novello

The war poet's relationship with Novello – now remembered mostly as a songwriter, but also an actor then fast becoming British cinema's No 1 leading man – began badly when Sassoon (who hated Novello's hit song Keep the Home Fires Burning) cut him dead; they nevertheless had an affair lasting a few months.

Erich Maria Remarque – theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The Retro-Hugos journey back to science fiction's past

The World Science Fiction Convention is revisiting 1938's novels for retrospective awards. How would you judge them?

When the science fiction community isn't involved in lengthy soul-searching over the Jonathan Ross fiasco – there's a sentence I never expected to type – its most assiduous members are currently reading up on novels first published in 1938, in order to vote on the 1939 Retro-Hugos. The Hugos are, arguably, science fiction's most prestigious prizes; every now and then, organisers of the World Science Fiction Convention also gives out retrospective awards for years when no awards were given.This time, they're going back 75 years, to 1939.

I'm not a member, so can't vote. But my money is on TH White's The Sword in the Stone for best novel– a stand-out childhood read. I vividly remember my confusion at trying to understand how Merlyn – "close inspection showed that he was far from clean" – could possibly live life backwards, and my delight at White's humour as he told of the childhood of the Wart, bedevilled by the obnoxious Kay. Also – and I can't believe any reader wouldn't feel the same – how much I wanted to join the Wart as a hawk.

Merlyn's owl, Archimedes, was my most desired possession for some time ("perhaps he does not want to be friends with you until he knows what you are like. With owls, it is never easy-come and easy-go"). And I understood how the Wart felt, about how grown-ups speak to children.

"He did not like the grown-ups who talked down to him, but the ones who went on talking in their usual way, leaving him to leap along in their wake, jumping at meanings, guessing, clutching at known words, and chuckling at complicated jokes as they suddenly dawned. He had the glee of the porpoise then, pouring and leaping through strange seas."

I suspect, as a child, I was reacting to a novel which is far more sophisticated than I remember it being, in a similar way.

I'm surprised to find I've also read a couple of other books on the list : CS Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, and, quite randomly, because my grandparents had a copy and because I'd loved The Wizard of Oz, Ruth Plumly Thomson's The Silver Princess in Oz. The Hobbit, first published in 1937, just misses out on making the line-up, which also includes an intriguing-sounding novel from a writer I'm a big fan of, Towers in the Mist by Elizabeth Goudge.

I'm less tempted by Dorothy Quick's Strange Awakening, in which the author "offers us a young woman kidnapped from Earth by the ruler of Venus (the Great Mind)", writes Claire Brialey in LonCon's Retro-Hugos briefing; it's " been described as an erotic fantastic adventure novel", she says. Hmm. Ditto August Anson's When Women Reign, a novel "depicting the misfortunes that might be observed in future centuries when such unnatural social conditions apply". God help us all.

How about The Sea Priestess by Dion Fortune – a pseudonym, apparently, for a prominent British occultist of the time, writes Brialey, which "was arguably intended at least partly as a teaching guide to practical ritual"? And I like the sound of Josephine Young Case's At Midnight on the 31st of March, which "describes how a village in New England finds itself alone in an apparently uninhabited America", and is "an early exploration of themes which continue to engage not only science fiction but many of the other stories that we tell about humanity".

I think I'm going to have to track some of these titles down, if only for the strange and wonderful covers they display (Tarzan in the Forbidden City looks remarkably and bizarrely Grecian, as a lion nibbles his shoulder). But then I'm a sucker for vintage SF. The shortlist is set to be announced at the same time as the 2014 Hugos, on Easter Saturday, so we can let you know then what has been voted on. In the meantime – any other TH White fans out there? And anyone read anything else on this list they'd recommend? I'm off to dig out my copy of White's continuation of The Sword in the Stone, The Once and Future King, meanwhile …

Hugo awardAwards and prizesScience fictionFictionFantasyAlison Flood
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10 favourite readers of fiction in fiction

Bookworms like Roald Dahl’s Matilda are common enough in novels. But what’s Sartre doing in TV’s Skins, and who quotes The Great Gatsby in The Wire?

Hannah Jane Parkinson

Beyond cuts: the many roles of a writer's editor

Novelist Eleanor Catton and her editor Max Porter's alliance shows how much more than wielding a blade goes into this relationship

Henry James called editing "the butchers' trade". But he also said, "I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort," so you can see how the old anglophile and his editors may have crossed horns.

However, if we're honest, wouldn't we, the reader, prefer to chew over a well-honed slice of literature than wade through fatty hunks of unedited, flabby prose? Isn't the editor's first loyalty to the reader, and not the author? Isn't it better to wield the knife than to club out something that the cow might approve of?

This weekend, as part of the New Zealand festival, The Luminaries author and winner of the Man Booker prize, Eleanor Catton, discussed deletion, deadlines and several other facets of the writer-editor relationship with her British editor Max Porter. If this sounds a little like sitting down with your ex-husband to publicly discuss why he always disliked your sense of humour, then think again; the modern editor is, according to Porter, "part proofreader, part therapist, part in-house champion and, increasingly, there to put a marketisation on the written word." This was less meat cleavers at dawn, more gentle emails about getting off Twitter.

With 391,000 books being self-published in the US in 2012 alone, the old 20th-century model of the creative editor is, according to Porter, "an endangered species". While Porter described his role as "like making a pot" alongside a writer "using gentle tweaks and nudges", it is nevertheless a "highly irritable occupation". And a thankless one, judging from Catton's anecdote about sitting next to Germaine Greer at an awards ceremony as Greer leant over and whispered very loudly that, "there's no such thing" as a good editor.

At its foundation the role of the editor is a blend of meddler and midwife. You're expected to not just pinch, pluck and pull a novel into shape, but, in many cases, make sure the thing is being written at all.

When he took on the job at Granta, Porter was told that Eleanor Catton was "at work on a slim novella; something to do with stars". And so, great traps are laid. Porter inherited a half-finished manuscript – "I think that's putting it generously" – and a publishing schedule that meant, at times, having to resort to somewhat blunt tools to get the thing delivered. "About two hours after I joined Twitter I got an email from Max," says Catton. "The subject was 'Twitter?!?!' and the body of the email just said '#murderweapon'. "

The destructive power of Twitter is a danger only too familiar to modern writers. Salman Rushdie has now quit the time-murdering social media monster to finish a new book, while Neil Gaiman has spent much of this year tweeting about his own Twitter sabbatical. However, in the case of some writers, editors have to take a more hands-on approach to such avoidance behaviour. Douglas Adams, the man who famously said, "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by," was locked into a hotel room with his editor, Sonny Mehta, until he'd finished So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.

As well as nannying a novel into existence, the modern editor is also tasked with protecting the writer from some of the harshest commercial winds - building them a nest in which they can, hopefully, produce greatness. "She was watching whole series of Breaking Bad while I was eating my thumbs," joked Porter, who described much of his editing role with The Luminaries as "disguising pressures from [Catton] while letting you know that you were nudging terrible lateness."

Perhaps, however, the greatest role of the editor, particularly in the case of a book as enormous as The Luminaries, is to give a bird's eye view of the project. As Stephen King wrote in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft: "when you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you're done, you have to step back and look at the forest."

Reading the whole book again, in its entirety, from start to finish on the plane over to Wellington, Max Porter was, he said, moved to tears. Even after months, if not years, of picking apart sentences, scenes and syntax, it speaks volumes that an editor can still be bowled over by the novel as a whole. Does a butcher weep over the beauty of his lamb chops? I think not.

An editor may be butcher, but they are also a midwife, a parent, a nanny, a matron, a therapist, a conspirator and a friend. But don't forget that, in the end, only a butcher can turn a live, stamping, snorting, animal into something you can stomach. So perhaps it's time we heard it for the butchers. Sorry, Henry.

FictionPublishingHenry JamesBooker prizeAwards and prizesEleanor CattonNell Frizzell
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The best books on Peru: start your reading here

Our literary tour of Peru embraces Manuel Odría's dictactorship, murder in Ayacucho, and the legacy of Pizarro's conquistadors

Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa

Vargas Llosa's ambitious novel is a portrait of power and politics in Peru under the dictatorship of General Manuel Odría in the 1950s.

Santiago Zavala, a young journalist, bumps into Ambrosio Pardo, his wealthy father's former chauffeur, and they go to a rundown bar in Lima (the cathedral of the title) to talk about old times. Santiago is estranged from his family, rejecting their upper middle-class values and his father Don Fermin's shady business dealings and rightwing politics. Ambrosio admires Don Fermin and served him well.

Through their reminiscences they tell the story of the country during those dark years. "At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?" asks Santiago on the opening page.

Vargas Llosa builds the novel around their hours-long conversation, linking it with other characters and conversations. Early on, the interlacing of dialogues between different narrators speaking at different times can be tricky, but persistence pays off.

The novel is a powerful exploration of repression, corruption and hypocrisy, along with the ugly prejudices of race and class.

Vargas Llosa, one of Latin America's best-known authors, ran for Peru's presidency in 1990. He lost, and was able to concentrate on writing rather than running the country. Twenty years later, aged 74, he won the Nobel prize.

Red April by Santiago Roncagliolo

Roncagliolo's chilling political thriller is set in the provincial town of Ayacucho in 2000, in the month leading up to Holy Week. An eccentric, mother-obsessed prosecutor, newly returned to his hometown from the capital, Lima, is asked to investigate a series of grisly murders.

He suspects the killings result from a resurgence of the Maoist-inspired Shining Path guerrillas, but the savage, two-decade insurgency that claimed 70,000 lives is officially over. "In this country, there is no terrorism, by orders from the top," a senior military officer tells him.

The lines between good and evil blur as civilians are caught between Shining Path terror and the brutal military response. Amid the violence, the state is making preparations to rig the impending presidential election. The prosecutor finds himself out of his depth as the murders get ever closer to him: "All the people I talk to die."

The suspense rises as the story takes some dramatic turns on its way to a gripping climax.

Roncagliolo excavates the dark side of his country's political and cultural turbulence, nailing entrenched corruption, impunity and racism in Peruvian society. That said, the story is served up with irony and black humour.

Peruvian writer, journalist and scriptwriter Roncagliolo now lives in Spain.

The Conquest of the Incas by John Hemming

Hemming's account of how a small band of greedy, god-fearing adventurers destroy a civilisation is a superb work of history. His impressive scholarship and sparkling prose tell an extraordinary tale of courage and cruelty, vividly describing the intrigue, treachery and slaughter that take place as Pizarro's conquistadors go about their brutish business.

The Spaniards, a mere 168 men, arrive at a time of civil wars and unrest among the native peoples, who are also decimated by the European disease of smallpox – leaving the once-mighty empire weakened. On top of that, Spanish horses, weapons and armour give the invaders superiority over the Inca forces.

The book focuses on the 40 years between the initial invasion in 1532 and the execution of the last emperor, Túpac Amaru. Although Hemming remains scrupulously impartial, it's hard not to feel sympathy for the Incas in the unequal struggle between the old and new worlds.

The Spaniards' subjugation and exploitation of the Indians shapes the hierarchical Peru of today, which still grapples with their legacy. Despite that, as Hemming points out, the Quechua-speaking population has "survived with its language and many of its customs unchanged", and forms a majority in the country.

Hemming, a British writer and explorer, is a former director of the Royal Geographic Society.

PeruFictionPushpinder Khaneka
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Joe McGinniss: legendary US journalist, little-known soccer fanatic

The author of The Selling of the President 1968, when I met him, appeared far more interested in lower-division Italian football than Nixon

It will be the destiny of Joe McGinniss, who has died of complications arising from prostate cancer at the age of 71, to be remembered for two things. First, for The Selling of the President 1968, his forensic account of the Nixon campaign in that year's presidential election. Second, for Fatal Vision, the true crime book that in turn led him to become the subject for Janet Malcolm's meditation on reporting ethics, The Journalist and the Murderer.

My own memories of McGinniss are rather different. In 1999, I was working at the football magazine FourFourTwo when a sample chapter of a book called The Miracle of Castel di Sangro landed on my desk. I thumbed through it, then noticed the author's name on the cover. I called the publicity department of the publisher and asked: Could this account of one season in the life of a lower-division Italian football team really have been written by the same man who wrote The Selling of the President 1968? Yes, I was told, it could. In that case, could I interview him?

I interviewed Joe, and thus began one of those strange interludes that can happen to journalists. He'd fallen in love with football, to the exclusion of virtually all else, and pursued it with a vigour that was almost frightening in its intensity – he had walked out of the OJ Simpson trial, handing back a huge contract to write a book about it, in order to go to Italy to write The Miracle of Castel di Sangro.

We became email correspondents, chuntering on about football to each other. And when I told him my wife and I were planning to visit New York and Boston early the following year, he invited us to come and stay with him and his wife Nancy at their house in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He picked us up from the railway station in Albany on a snowy day in a grubby old station wagon and drove us to his warm and welcoming home, where it became apparent quite how hard he'd fallen for football.

"Look at this," he exclaimed delightedly, picking up a book that had arrived from Amazon that morning. It was a match-by-match history of derbies between Stoke City and Port Vale. He showed us the fax he was sending to Italy to bid happy birthday to Roberto Baggio, with whom he was infatuated. He invited me to get up in the early hours of the following morning to watch a delayed transmission of an Italy Under-21 match with him (he had a giant satellite dish to enable him to watch as much football as possible).

The thing was, he was so obsessed with football it was almost impossible to get him to talk about anything else. You'd get fleeting mentions – how he was in the hospital room after Bobby Kennedy got shot – then he'd steer the conversation back to the game. And so I'd press to hear about Bret Easton Ellis or Donna Tartt, and how the creative writing course he taught at Benington inspired both Less Than Zero and The Secret History, and instead I'd get an analysis of the misuse of the offside trap.

I didn't know Joe at all well: our email conversations petered out after a couple of years, and those few days in Massachusetts were the only time I ever met him. And I don't think anyone would necessarily call him easy: he delightedly detailed his ruckuses with publishers past and present, castigated Janet Malcolm – who was clearly something of a bête noire to him – and referred to himself only partly mockingly as "the youngest person to top the New York Times bestseller list, apart from Anne Frank". I don't think I'd have wanted to get in a row with him. But I've never forgotten his kindness to me as a young journalist, and his genuine curiosity to pick my brains even while I tried to get to his.

I'm leaving work early tonight, to get the train to Brighton, for a football match I really don't think I'm going to enjoy very much. I think Joe would have approved.

Sport and leisureMichael Hann
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Philip K Dick's funny and peculiar near-futurology

Both eerie and amusing, Ubik's vision of 1992 from 1966 mixes unsettling prescience with some terrific comedy

The first thing to say about Ubik is that it's a serious piece of writing. It's an unashamedly entertaining fast read, it's full of pulp fiction tropes and daft jokes, the language is simple and possibly even workmanlike, but in the immediate aftermath of reading it, I'm mightily impressed. And more than a little confused. Ubik juggles notions of reality and the limits of imagination with consummate skill, while chucking up endless extra balls relating to time-travel, subjective viewpoints, morality and immortality, divine intervention and structural integrity, Plato and Buddha. Everything blurs, it's impossible to follow any one element individually, but watching them all whir round together is mesmerising.

The second thing to say is that this reading experience is so exhilarating, and – variously – surprising, bewildering and unexpected, that I'm worried about spoiling it for anyone else. I don't want to talk too much about the plot and mechanics of the story for fear of giving away the secrets that Philip K Dick so expertly unlocks and conceals. For this first piece I'll aim instead to talk about less plot-oriented aspects of the book and author.

First, in case you were wondering, here's Philip K Dick's assessment of the book's themes:

"Salvific information penetrating through the 'walls' of our world by an entity with personality representing a life – and reality supporting quasi-living force."

I'm glad that's cleared up. The inside of this man's head must have been a fascinating and terrifying place to be. On that subject, one of my favourite insights into Philip K Dick's imaginative reality comes from the story told in Lawrence Sutin's Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K Dick. In 1958, the novelist and his second wife decided to move out of Berkeley to be beside the sea, across the bay in Sausalito. They stayed in the apartment they had rented for just one night. When he woke up in the morning "and saw nothing but water, his response, as a good Jungian, was to see the vast bay as a sign of his own overwhelming unconscious forces. Back to Berkeley they went."

The same biography also contains a fine insight into Dick's thoughts on the nature of science fiction, dating from his first discovery of the genre. In 1940, aged 12, he bought a magazine called Stirring Science Stories, mistaking it for a non-fiction magazine Popular Science. "I was most amazed," Dick said later. "Stories about science? At once I recognised the magic which I had found, in earlier times, in the Oz books – this magic now coupled not with magic wands but with science … In any case my view became magic equals science … and science (of the future) equals magic."

That magical science is visible throughout Ubik. Meanwhile, the "science (of the future)" in Ubik is a subject I can discuss without giving too much away, I hope. Reading group contributor jmschrei made an interesting related comment on last week's post:

"I'm really enjoying this book so far. However I can't help but chuckle at the technological elements that seem peculiarly anachronistic and rooted in the 1960s. The vidphone sounds remarkably clunky and a secretary is described at her typewriter! I mean when was the last time you saw a secretary at a typewriter in an office context?"

Probably the last time I saw a typewriter in use was around 1992. And that is also, actually, when the book is set. (Or parts of the book. But let's not get too deep into that yet!) The interesting thing about this date is that it's less than 30 years after the book was written, in 1966. Dick was describing a future that he might reasonably have hoped to see, had his depressingly early death not intervened. Making much of this imaginary 1992 familiar was almost certainly a deliberate device. That peculiar anachronism adds to the unsettling atmosphere and constant feeling of time moving in and out of focus. One minute the characters are sitting at typewriters and putting music on a record player (albeit a super-duper one), the next they are blasting off for the moon.

The other notable feature of the technology Dick employs to make his characters' world seem so strange is that it's often funny – and can be strangely prescient, for all that it is out of time. Who today wouldn't immediately think of the internet when reading that the protagonist Joe Chip has a machine upon which he can "set the dial for low gossip?" Who wouldn't also think of the internet when seeing how easily the technology can track Joe Chip and how much it knows about his personal habits? Who wouldn't feel a shiver of uneasy recognition?

At the other extreme, the idea of a talking door that refuses to let Joe out until he pays it a fee is wonderfully ludicrous. Especially since it enjoys arguing with him so much: "'You discover I'm right'," the door said. It sounded smug."

In a brilliant and provocative essay on Ubik (originally highlighted by reading group contributor everythingsperfect - so thanks!) Stanislaw Lem, the author of Solaris, writes: "There is no point in estimating the futurological likelihood of such details in this novel as those apartment and refrigerator doors which the tenant is forced to argue with—for these are fictional ingredients created for the purpose of doing two jobs at once: to introduce the reader into a world decidedly different from the present-day one, and to convey a certain message to him by means of this world."

It could be said that Lem has almost comically avoided the most important thing about the argument with the fridge - which is that it's funny. But I'd certainly agree with him about the way Dick uses his future objects. They add texture and meaning to the story and its world – not to mention useful contrast and something solid to grasp when this world starts to slip away. But let's save that astonishing breakdown for next week. Until then, one last intimation of the delights the book has in store from Stanislaw Lem: "[Dick] leaves the reader at the end on the battlefield, enveloped in the aura of a mystery as grotesque as it is strange."

Philip K DickScience fictionFictionSam Jordison
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Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading this week?

Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them

Claire ArmitsteadGuardian readers

Prize fights: A roundup of rivalrous literary awards

The Folio prize adds to an already crowded field of contenders wishing to be the No 1. John Dugdale draws up a book on the competition

In a few hours, the Folio prize's challenge to the Man Booker becomes real as it announces its first winner; the inaugural longlist of the Baileys women's prize, last year the Women's prize and formerly the Orange, was announced on Friday. This sets up a four-way clash in literary fiction, and rivalries between prizes are just as vigorous as those between shortlisted books …

Literary fiction
Main players Man Booker, Baileys, Costa novel, Folio.
Others Independent foreign fiction, Goldsmiths, James Tait Black.
Recent activity Booker changed eligibility rules ahead of Folio's launch, so Americans are eligible for both. Baileys – first longlist just announced – is Orange relabelled after sponsor change.
Pros/cons Booker has pluses (prestige) and minuses (fusty image) of being No 1. Folio has challenger energy but lacks clear differentiation from rival. Both risk being US-dominated like Baileys. Costa remains British/Irish residents only.
Least likely to pick Jonathan Franzen (Booker); whatever the previous Booker winner was (Folio, Costa); British woman over 60, eg Hilary Mantel (Baileys).

Poetry
Players TS Eliot, Forward (three awards), Costa poetry.
Others National poetry competition, Ted Hughes.
Recent activity Last year's Forward ceremony controversially saw poems read by actors, not poets. Alice Oswald withdrew from TS Eliot in 2011 over investment firm sponsor.
Pros/cons TS Eliot is judged only by fellow poets, possibly adding credibility but prompting suspicions of cosiness. Forward's revamp suggests  awareness it had got into a rut. Costa has less prominence because it is one of a cluster of prizes, but Christopher Reid and Jo Shapcott have recently gone on to win overall award.
Least likely Ian McMillan (TS Eliot); Geoffrey Hill (Forward, Costa).

Short stories
Players BBC national story, Sunday Times EFG.
Other Costa (unpublished stories only, public vote).
Recent activity Only launched in 2010, the paper's award has shortened its previously overlong title.
Pros/cons Sunday Times has huge purse for 6,000-word-max tale (£30,000) and international stars, whereas BBC (£15,000) is UK only. BBC guarantees Radio 4 exposure.
Least likely Senior male novelist (BBC); anyone British (Sunday Times).

First novels
Players Betty Trask, Costa first novel.
Others Desmond Elliott (since 2008), Guardian first book (non-fiction also eligible), Dylan Thomas (new writers).
Recent activity Costa 2013 debut winner, Nathan Filer, also won £25,000 overall award – first such double since 2006.
Pros/cons Betty Trask has strong talent-spotting record, eg Eleanor Catton (pictured), but only because judges ignore founder's rubric requiring "romantic or traditional" fiction. Costa choices can seem capricious, and rarely "endorsed" by other prize panels.
Least likely Anything Betty would have enjoyed (Trask); heavily promoted and "promotable" authors (Costa).
Science books
Players Royal Society Winton, Wellcome.
Other Samuel Johnson (in theory).
Recent activity Wellcome just relaunched with more money (£30,000), high-profile judges and Elizabeth Gilbert on shortlist.
Pros/cons Royal Society has wider remit, but revitalised rival threatens to make it look blokeish, donnish and stuffy. Wellcome is ostensibly restricted to health-related titles, but eclectic shortlist implies definition-creep.
Least likely A woman, or Brian Cox (Royal Society); What I Learned In My Lab by A Boffin (Wellcome).

Non-fiction
Players Samuel Johnson, Costa biography.
Others Specialist non-fiction (eg science, history) awards, debut awards.
Recent activity Samuel Johnson is no longer BBC-sponsored but still has some TV coverage, like Booker and unlike Costa.
Pros/cons Not a true genre head-to-head, but last two SJ winners have been biographical and in 2013 the same book (by Lucy Hughes-Hallett) won both accolades. SJ has yet to choose a book with popular appeal, while overlooking non-fic bestsellers by Richard Dawkins and Daniel Kahneman. By forcing them to compete with memoirs, Costa runs risk of snubbing major biographies.
Least likely A scientist (Samuel Johnson); 900-page old-fashioned life of British or US literary giant or politician (Costa).

Children's fiction
Players Carnegie medal, Guardian children's fiction.
Recent activity Venerable Carnegie looks a little less staid after wins for Patrick Ness (twice) and Neil Gaiman.
Pros/cons Carnegie judging process, by conclave of librarians, is relatively shadowy. Guardian is judged by peers and can't be won twice – so even if Philip Pullman's next book is epoch-making, he won't be eligible. Retains air of cheeky, radical challenger, despite considerable overlap in winners.
Least likely Stephenie Meyer, JK Rowling (Carnegie); Jeff Kinney, JK Rowling (Guardian).

Booker prizeFictionAwards and prizesForward prize for poetryPoetryFolio prizeSamuel Johnson prizeBaileys women's prize for fiction 2014TS Eliot prize for poetryCarnegie medalJohn Dugdale
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Poem of the week: from The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn by Andrew Marvell

A dazzling blend of symbol, myth, descriptive realism and a poignantly authentic young girl's voice

This week's poem takes the form of an extract from Andrew Marvell's The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn. Spoken by an innocent, but not entirely inexperienced young girl, the poem demonstrates Marvell's brilliant talent for female ventriloquism (compare the nun's speech in his masterpiece, Upon Appleton House). And it's a beautifully paced and organised narrative, like all his longer poems.

It begins with what screenwriters call the inciting incident: "The wanton troopers riding by/ Have shot my fawn, and it will die./ Ungentle men! They cannot thrive -/ To kill thee!" Marvell scholar Annabel Patterson adds a controversial dimension when she says of this passage that "it gives its speaker, if only for a moment, a view of the New Model Army appropriate to the daughter of a cavalier household". While dating Marvell's poems is an uncertain business, the editor of The Complete Poems, Christopher Ricks, considers that The Nymph Complaining … may belong to the period the poet spent at the Fairfax estate at Nun Appleton where he was tutor in languages to Lord Fairfax's daughter, Mary, between 1650-53. This, of course, was an Anglican family, something to be borne in mind if we identify the speaker with a Catholic sensibility.

It would be rash to assume the Nymph is based on the young Mary Fairfax, but reasonable to imagine that Marvell had paid close attention to his pupil's voice and idiom, and that these allowed him to strike new notes of excitement and candour also released by the genre. The sentences are short, there are many exclamations, and sometimes the words tumble out in slightly disordered syntax – though the latter is a typical quirk and occurs in other poems.

Marvell was a great writer about gardens and the comparative virtues of order and wildness. When the Nymph in the lines below declares, "I have a garden of my own" we might wonder if he intends a sexual metaphor. This enclosure, which looks at first sight like "a little wilderness" could suggest virginity, preserved in an ambiguous profusion of roses (red roses, we'll discover later) and white lilies. But Marvell is also imagining an idealised psychological space, one that lets natural innocence and exuberance flourish unthreatened.

There's no doubt that the girl is in control of her own chastity. Earlier in the poem, she tells us the fawn was presented to her by Sylvio, who accompanied his gift with a seductive pun: "Look how your huntsman here/ Hath taught a fawn to hunt his dear". The echo of Wyatt's dainty, erotic hunting in "They flee from me…" is unmistakable. Sylvio, however, grows "wild" as the fawn becomes tame, and, finally, "quite regardless of my smart/ Left me his fawn, but took his heart". The abrupt tetrameter lines emphasise a matter-of-fact sort of reaction. That she's more than content with her new pet may suggest she may simply be too young for Sylvio's heart. The fawn allows her to practice for adult love through nurture and play. Admired as an image of inviolability, it is itself a child, and its death, the death of childhood, unmediated by the consolations of mature erotic love. The loss is insurmountable and brings about the girl's own demise.

Nymph and fawn are not interchangeable. As the Nymph sees things, her pet is so faultless that it deserves an alabaster memorial. Her own statue will be made of common-or-garden marble. And it will shed tears.

Weeping statues, like acts of contrition, recall the possibility that Marvell is expressing Catholic sympathies. And the significance of tears generally in the poem reminds us that, among the genres touched on (the pastoral, the country house, the feminine elegy for a dead pet) is that rather curious genre for modern readers – the tear poem.

Both Nymph and fawn are dignified by their tears, the outward symbol of heartfelt sorrow. The Nymph is less "white" than her fawn – like Mary Magdalene compared to the Lamb of God. Penitent tears are appropriate. At the same time, her emotion is more than penitential. So great is her grief that, even as a statue, she will weep so continuously that the tears carve runnels in her marble breasts.

Menstruation and perhaps Transubstantiation seem to be foreshadowed in lines 80-92 (sometimes compared to the Song of Songs). Here, after eating the roses which stain its lips like blood, the fawn kisses the girl and imprints her lips, before going to sleep "in whitest sheets of lilies cold". But perhaps there's a risk that we lose all sight of realism by revelling in Marvell's symbolic bravura. The poet had a fine sympathy for creatures and their sufferings, writing in some detail about the meadow-nesting birds ("rails") killed by the mowers in Upon Appleton House, for example. The fawn's pointless slaughter at the beginning of the Nymph's lament, and the emotional charge maintained throughout, lend a more-than-symbolic weight to the virtuoso display. Marvell's fawn is a paragon, but not a unicorn. His Nymph, abandoning herself to full-on adolescent despair, is a real girl, if in an imaginary garden.

from The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn

I have a garden of my own,
But so with roses overgrown
And lilies, that you would it guess
To be a little wilderness.
And all the springtime of the year
It only lovèd to be there.
Among the beds of lilies I
Have sought it oft, where it should lie,
Yet could not, till itself would rise,
Find it, although before mine eyes.
For in the flaxen lilies' shade,
It like a bank of lilies laid.
Upon the roses it would feed,
Until its lips ev'n seemed to bleed:
And then to me 'twould boldly trip,
And print those roses on my lip.
But all its chief delight was still
On roses thus itself to fill:
And its pure virgin limbs to fold
In whitest sheets of lilies cold.
Had it lived long, it would have been
Lilies without, roses within.
 O help! O help! I see it faint
And die as calmly as a saint!
See how it weeps! The tears do come
Sad, slowly dropping like a gum.
So weeps the wounded balsam: so
The holy frankincense doth flow;
The brotherless Heliades
Melt in such amber tears as these.
 I in a golden vial will
Keep these two crystal tears; and fill
It till it do o'erflow with mine;
Then place it in Diana's shrine.
 Now my sweet fawn is vanished to
Whither the swans and turtles go:
In fair Elysium to endure,
With milk-white lambs and ermins pure.
O do not run too fast; for I
Will but bespeak thy grave, and die.
First, my unhappy statue shall
Be cut in marble; and withal
Let it be weeping too – but there
Th' engraver sure his art may spare,
For I so truly thee bemoan
That I shall weep though I be stone:
Until my tears, still dropping, wear
My breast, themselves engraving there.
There at my feet shalt thou be laid,
Of purest alabaster made:
For I would have thine image be
White as I can, though not as thee.

PoetryCarol Rumens
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