The Guardian's Blog, page 213

Why books need literary prizes

The Costa and Booker prizes may be a literary lottery but awards have more influence now than reviews

Tomorrow sees the annual Costa book award: a notoriously hard competition to get a handle on, not least because, now the individual categories (fiction, poetry, biography etc) have been adjudicated, the celebrity jury has the unenviable task of comparing Hilary Mantel's Man Booker-winning novel Bring Up the Bodies with a graphic biography, Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, and three other category winners, including Sally Gardner's Maggot Moon, a book for children. It's a bad case of apples and oranges, and the outcome rarely satisfies. Still, whatever its deficiencies, I agree with those who say that, in general, these trophies are A Good Thing. Yes, it's a lottery, but it's a lottery that attracts the reading public to new books, and sometimes promotes unknowns. What's not to like?

Far more than book reviews, it's literary prizes that shape the afterlives of new titles. Even in the recession-hit UK, these prizes show no sign of losing popular appeal. Far from it. As well as Costa, the Booker will soon be facing competition from the avowedly highbrow Literature prize, set up in protest at the perceived dumbing-down of the Booker. Elsewhere there are South Asian, Russian and African prizes. A hundred years ago, there were virtually no prizes, but there's no question that the phenomenon is here to stay, reflecting (I think) the important role of the marketplace in the contemporary book world. We are all Thatcherites now.

In other parts of the literary landscape, however, it's a case of plus ca change, plus c'est la même chose. On a whim, I've been re-reading Somerset Maugham's acerbic little novel of literary life, Cakes and Ale. Just like George Gissing's New Grub Street, much of it could have been written yesterday. Maugham's satire on Edward Driffield, a famous and greatly revered writer bearing a more-than-passing resemblance to Thomas Hardy, and his portrait of Alroy Kear, a similarly biting evisceration of popular 30s bestseller Hugh Walpole, reveals a young novelist taking well-timed shots at his seniors. That's a story as old as the hills, and eventually Maugham himself would fall from favour, too (although unlike Walpole, whom I dare say nobody reads any more, the author of The Razor's Edge and Of Human Bondage continues to sell and sell).

An introductory note to the paperback edition of Cakes and Ale contains Maugham's whiskery complaints against the perils and burdens of professional authorship. In particular, he deplores the publicity circuit in language that certainly dates him. If there is "one form of advertisement" that he loathes, it is, he says, "the cocktail party that is given to launch a book. This ignoble practice is not rendered less objectionable when it is presumed to be given at the expense of the publisher …"

Actually, these days, the recession has dramatically cut publishers' launch parties, dinners etc. Prizes such as Costa and Booker, on the other hand, are floated on a sea of sponsored alcohol. God knows what Maugham would say about that.

Costa book awardsMan Booker International prize 2013Awards and prizesRobert McCrum
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Poem of the week: Rendition by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

The Australian poet's blunt language describes the expectation of abuse and offers a metaphor for the suffering of old age

"Rendition" used to be an innocent sort of word, likely to be found in a kindly local-paper report of the end-of-term junior-school concert: "The Year 3 Recorder Band rounded off the evening with a tuneful rendition of 'Kumbaya'." Now the juridical meaning of the word is the one uppermost in people's minds, the qualifier "extraordinary" hovering with added menace. "Rendition" in this sense means the handing over of a person from one jurisdiction to another: "extraordinary rendition" allows the person to be sent to another country, usually one permitting interrogation under torture.

This week's poem, "Rendition", by the Australian poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe, is shaped around a litany of pleas, spoken by someone imagining, and expecting, various forms of physical abuse. It's from the "New Poems" section of a career-spanning New and Selected Poems, recently published by Carcanet. Wallace-Crabbe, born in 1934, is a prolific and versatile writer. His technical accomplishment is immense, and the quick-thinking, good-humoured demotic makes it all look easy and easygoing. But his poetry is also concerned with the "blood and tears" that the painter and war-poet Isaac Rosenberg described, in relation to his paintings, as necessities of art. He was uncertain of his abilities as an artist, but when Rosenberg went into the trenches, he wrote poems that were true to the "blood and tears" of a particularly terrible war. "Rendition" has the universality and particularity of a great war-poem – but the frontline from which Wallace-Crabbe reports is not that of the battlefield.

Much of the poem's power, of course, lies in the graphic, if abbreviated, descriptions of the different methods of abuse. There's nothing elaborate in the language: it's blunt and simple, and that sparseness of poetic figure minimises the safe distance we normally keep between ourselves and full-on horror. The images are always memorable, from "the large plain dull old car" to "the bloody gobbet hacked off your left ear –/ which you are then going to be forced to eat." But the poem operates not only through images. As the relentless litany continues, all our senses are attacked in turn ("the cold, the blaring, the slaps", "pints of liquid trickled down your throat", "a bully's foul breath up against your face"). Nerve-endings are involved. We flinch, as the most vulnerable, pleasure-giving body-parts are insulted in a sadistic inversion of sexuality. The pain is accompanied by shame and literal shrinking: "the prodded humiliation of your nudity", "the naked genitals like frightened mice."

The tortures that the speaker's prayers evoke as he begs to be spared are so clearly described each time that it's as if the prayers were being rebuffed by a real interrogator in a real prison cell. In the fifth stanza, the pleading voice seems to rise to a roar of panic: "Fuck, no, not the electrodes." (If you thought that particular Anglo-Saxon-ism had been stripped of its force by casual overuse these days, think again.) But for all the immediacy of the scenes, the speaker is clearly outside the experience. The torture, so vividly imagined, is speculative. It could be taking place in any "Elsewhere," any "regime of colonels or generals of psychopaths".

This is one of many clues that the poem is asking to be read metaphorically. Another is the word "creeping". Torture involves "elaborate pain", but the initial pain is stunning rather than "creeping", or the "slow parody of how lives end". Right from the start, the poem is sending us in another direction. Even the title, "Rendition," has precise metaphorical resonance. Old age, no less than the past, is "another country." Most of us lucky enough to have been healthy in youth and middle-age, will enter the final failing years like strangers.

This is the poem's frontline: the suffering of old age. The extended metaphor forces us to recognise how brutal the condition can be, and also how brutally institutions may handle it. The sharp understatement of the objection to "the treatment of survival as precisely equal to dying" suggests the sophistication and variety of sanctioned suffering. It's not only the neglect, or even the actual violence some patients experience in the geriatric ward, but the invasive treatments that the poem finds shocking. Doctors can behave like policemen. Diagnosis and therapy may simply prolong the process of dying.

The last stanza takes a breather. The tone is matter-of-fact at first, calmly truthful. Deftly, the casual catchphrase "by and large" is turned back on itself, becoming "by and small" to remind us that bodies are not as important as we owners like to think, and not "designed" to last. If we were in any doubt about the poem's real meaning, it is underlined now as the tentative, tactful "You may die" is corrected to "You will suffer and die."

An ambivalent note of consolation ends the poem: "You will survive, language holding some trace of you for years,/ and the mourners, too." This sort of survival is distinctly what writers wish for, and many poems have invoked it, not least Shakespeare's sonnets. But is Wallace-Crabbe also suggesting that every articulate human makes some small mark on the language? Will the mourners survive in their own right, or merely hold the memory of the "you" for a while longer? It would accord with the poet's generous vision that "the mourners" (ie everyman) could live on, too, in the form of some little differences they made, via language, to the sum-total of human memory.

This is not very much to offset the horrors of the frontline report from the country of final rendition. And that's how it should be. Old age is not for wimps (as someone said). We need poets to tell the truth about it. "Rendition" is not a horror-poem but an intense and courageous account of some undeniable facts of the "civilised" life.

Rendition

Not, please, this creeping elaborate pain

and not slow parody of how lives end,

nor policemen in mufti playing a dirty god,

not the stinking underside of Elsewhere,

regimes of colonels or generals or psychopaths,

not fascination with seeing just how far a body can be made to go

nor the treatment of survival as precisely equal to dying.

Please, not a battering on the door at three in the morning;

not, I'm afraid, you're going to have to come with me.

Not the large plain dull old car

waiting outside your door with motor grumbling

for the quick take-off,

nor the bareness of a shabby room with overbright lighting.

Not Them, moving in.

Certainly not having to take off your clothes;

water, the truncheon, the cold, the blaring, the slaps

and long standing still in one damned place,

not the prodded humiliation of your nudity,

clothed ones treating you as a slab of meat,

not the drawn-out thickness of questioning

and not the detumescence of hope.

Not the naked genitals like frightened mice,

not something hard inserted in the vagina,

not pints of liquid trickled down your throat,

not a bully's foul breath up against your face

as concentration goes,

not the pummelled phonebook against your guts

leaving no distinct bruises.

Not the electrodes.

Fuck, no, not the electrodes

and not your buttocks beaten, then beaten again,

not something pushed right up under your fingernails

nor a bloody gobbet hacked off your left ear –

which you are then going to be forced to eat.

Not weeks without food.

Bodies have been designed frail, by and large, by and small,

ready to be tormented and taken apart.

The shit may run down your cold legs.

You may die.

You will suffer and die.

You will survive, language holding some trace of you for years,

And the mourners, too.

PoetryCarol Rumens
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The truth about crime fiction

Realism would be 1,000 pages long and crushingly dull, admits top writer

What relation does crime fiction have to real crime? Only a passing resemblance, judging by a panel discussion that brought together three authors last week at the British Library, chaired by Barry Forshaw and accompanying its new exhibition, Murder in the Library. "Your first duty is the story," said Mark Billingham. "It's not realism, it's heightened. If you wrote realistic crime novels, they'd be a thousand pages long and crushingly dull."

Robert Ryan agreed, citing a failed attempt at authenticity in which he learned to play the trumpet to empathise with a musician character. However, the Guardian's crime fiction reviewer Laura Wilson seemed less eager to renounce realism without caveats – understandably, as her period novels draw on detailed research. And in making her series sleuth DI Stratton sober and married, she pointed out, she was challenging the fantasy stereotype of the boozy loner.

As for real, celebrated crimes, how much freedom you have depends on "how long ago it was and how much people feel they 'own' the crime", said Wilson, who found many felt they did when she put the serial killer John Christie into a book. Ryan recalled getting a faintly menacing phone call from train robber Bruce Reynolds about his novel recreating the 60s heist, but cautioned that what comes from the horse's mouth is not necessarily truth, as memories fade and coppers and crooks alike may be intent on myth preservation.

The authors disliked the vogue for graphic violence, deploring publisher pressure to make books "gritty" (although Wilson said she was "only squeamish about violence to dogs"); and Billingham denounced "the forensic detail in Kathy Reichs, about things like the difference between cat hair and dog hair. I don't care!"

As they were broadly agreed that their novels were artificial constructions, dismissing other writers' work as wildly unrealistic might seem a tricky manoeuvre; but they also had no difficulty in rubbishing corpse-filled TV series and novels lazily dependent on brainy serial killers. The body counts can be "completely ludicrous", and these bogeymen "let us off the hook, when in reality a killer like Fred West is next door," argued Billingham.

Questions from the audience elicited a Billingham bombshell in which he named Jack the Ripper (or, at any rate, the person visitors to the Black Museum, the police's private collection, are told committed the crimes) as Aaron Kosminski; and ended with the slain bodies of Stieg Larsson, Stephen King and Colin Dexter piling up next to Reichs's, as panellists gleefully murdered their reputations – an awkwardly bloody denouement for an event complementing a celebration of crime-writing.

Crime fictionJohn Dugdale
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At last – a books prize that rewards innovation

There can never be too many literary prizes

Contemporary fiction doesn't do badly for prizes. There's the Man Booker, the Impac, the Orange (now called the Women's prize for fiction, since the loss of its sponsor) and the Costa (which has categories for best novel and best first novel), and next month sees the inauguration of the Literature prize, open, like most of the above, to novels written in English but originating beyond these shores. In addition there are prizes for genre fiction – detective novels, romance and sci-fi – as well as the excellent Encore award, reserved exclusively for second novels.

Enough to be going on with? Well, no. Not just because there can never be too many literary prizes (it's a profession with precious few bonuses), but because the brief of all existing prizes is to seek out "the best" or "most promising", rather than to highlight what's innovative, ground-breaking, iconoclastic – fiction at its most novel. This is why Goldsmiths College, where I work part-time as a creative writing tutor, has just launched a new £10,000 prize, in association with the New Statesman.

The new fiction prize will go to a book that celebrates the spirit of invention and characterises the genre at its most surprising. Drawing up a description was tricky, not least because we wanted to avoid the word "experimental", which no one seems to like any more. It's easier to list the sort of writers who might have won the prize had it been around in recent years: David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Nicola Barker, Geoff Dyer and Tom McCarthy come to mind.

Further back, in 1922, James Joyce's Ulysses would have been battling it out with Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room – whereas in 1962, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange might have edged out Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. And Julian Barnes might have got it for Flaubert's Parrot in 1984, a quarter of a century before he won the Booker.

The presiding genius of fictional innovation is Laurence Sterne, the 300th anniversary of whose birth is celebrated this year. "I have laid a plan for something new, quite out of the beaten track," he said of Tristram Shandy. What constitutes novelty in 2013 will doubtless be much debated by the four judges (Nicola Barker, the novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the culture editor of the New Statesman Jonathan Derbyshire, and the head of the Goldsmiths literature department Tim Parnell).

One contentious feature of contemporary writing which the prize won't want to ignore is the number of texts that mix fiction with non-fiction. Francis Spufford's Red Plenty is a good example. And then there's WG Sebald, whose books blur the distinction between fiction, memoir and history, and who once compared his method to that of a dog running through a field – there might be nothing systematic or plottable, but he got where he needed to by following his nose.

The Goldsmiths Prize will be looking for books, like Sebald's, that break the mould. The hope is that the prize will encourage more risk-taking among novelists, editors and agents alike.

Goldsmiths, University of LondonBlake Morrison
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Reader reviews roundup

Salman Rushdie, Mo Yan and Oliver Jeffers are among the authors who featured in this week's reader reviews

Two of this week's reviewers use the reader review platform to take issue with earlier opinions, which delighted me - as part of the point of reviews is to generate conversation.

Duncan Zuill gave short shrift to Zoe Heller's Hatchet Award-winning review of Salman Rusdie's Joseph Anton. "She doesn't understand the nature of memoirs," he writes. "It is a 'A memoir' it says on the title - of course it's going to be self-indulgent at times!!"

His own experience of the audiobook made him realise how many of his memories about the "Satanic verses affair" were hazy or false.

This is for the people who want to hear Rushdie's side of the Salman Rushdie affair. It needed to be published to complete the story."

Campariandsoda took issue with Yiyun Li's review of the latest novel from China's new Nobel laureate Mo Yan.

Yiyun Li comments on Yan's "preoccupation with sex", highlighting the hypermasculinity of post-CR Chinese literature. Fair enough, but this can be seen in every corner of the literary world, and the euphemism? Well, in the end its a device used to mock and amuse, to entertain. There is something to be said for a good 'ole piece of red-blooded pastiche. Take for instance when our salivating protagonist "powboy" is subject to a tortuous dialogue with a glistening piece of meat: "Dear Luo Xiatong, you love meat and meat loves you. We love you, so come eat us. Being eaten by you makes us feel like a bride being taken by the man she loves." No one bats an eyelid when Proust describes the action of "Madeleine-dunking" so why here?

At the lighter end of the scale, our family reviewers continue to eclipse the rest of us. Marana, Hafsa (5) and Fatema (2) were not entirely convinced by the first book in Oliver Jeffers' new Huey series – The New Jumper.

We are big fans of Oliver Jeffers in our house, from my 2-year-old to my 5-year-old to myself (age withheld) we love his books. We found this book very different from his others, not as much colour , not as vibrant and the characters not as lovable as his other books. We did however, enjoy the book and the moral behind it. I discussed with my daughter - who enjoys football and wears football boots - that being different is good, so this book was very appropriate in our household.

Just one small problem: two-year-old Fatema is now desperate for an orange jumper with zigzags like the one featured in the book.

And that's it for this week.Thanks for all your reviews. If you have children under-7 and would like to join our family reviews, email us at childrens.books@guardian.co.uk. As ever, if we've mentioned your review, drop me a line at claire.armitstead@guardian.co.uk and I'll send you something orange and zigzaggy (or not) from the book cupboard.

Salman RushdieMo YanClaire Armitstead
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Burns is not the only bard

Still widely assumed a one-off because of his class, Burns actually had numerous contemporaries from ordinary backgrounds

In a slightly peevish strain, Sir Walter Scott wrote in the Edinburgh Annual Register for 1808 that "the success of Burns had the effect of exciting general emulation among all of his class in Scotland that were able to tag a rhyme. Poets began to chirp like grasshoppers in a sunshine day. The steep rocks poured down poetical goatherds, and the bowels of the earth vomited forth rhyming colliers". The reception Burns received from the Edinburgh literati – even their compliments and critical praises – had stressed a generation beforehand that he was something of a lusus naturae, that for a ploughman to write such poetry he must be "heav'n-taught", a minor form of miracle. But the truth is rather different. Scott deigns to mention only one similar poet, James Hogg, the "Ettrick Shepherd", who was a friend, a source for ballads and a rival. But there were a great many poets who were not from the monied classes at the times of Burns and in the decades thereafter, and it might be worthwhile this Burns Night to reflect on them. The valorisation of Burns as a unique, unrepeatable phenomenon of a writer obscures even further their achievements.

The Scott Monument has 16 busts of other Scottish poets surrounding the marble statue of Scott, including both Hogg and Burns (odd to think there was a time when the self-evident "national bard" was Scott, not Burns). Also among them is Robert Tannahill. Tannahill was born 1774 in Paisley and apprenticed as a handloom weaver at the age of 12. He worked in Bolton before returning home, and started to have some success publishing poems and songs in The Scots Magazine (his most famous is probably "The Braes of Balquhidder", which inspired "The Wild Mountain Thyme" with its opening words "Let us go, lassie, go to the Braes of Balquhidder". His work was, however, rejected by Archibald Constable in 1810; Tannahill drowned himself the same year.

The Tap-Room
This warl's a tap-room owre and owre
     Whaur ilk ane tak's his caper
Some taste the sweet, some drink the sour
     As waiter Fate sees proper;
Let mankind live, ae social core,
     An drap a' selfish quar'ling,
And when the Landlord ca's his score,
     May ilk ane's clink be sterling.

All the poets tend to be given patronising soubriquets, so Janet Little (1759-1813), from Ecclefechan, like the sage Thomas Carlyle, was The Scotch Milkmaid. She was supported by a friend of Burns, Frances Dunlop, and James Boswell. Though much of her poetry was not only formal English but replete with names like Damon, Celia and Alonzo, she did occasionally use mild forms of dialect. This is from her "Epistle to Robert Burns":

Did Addison or Pope but hear,
Or Sam, that critic most severe,
A plough-boy sing, wi' throat sae clear,
They, in a rage,
Their works wad a' in pieces tear
An' curse your page.

If I should strain my rupy throat,
To raise thy praise wi' swelling note

My rude, unpolish'd strokes wad blot
Thy brilliant shine,
An' ev'ry passage I would quote
Seem less sublime.

The talk I'll drop; wi' heart sincere

To heav'n present a humble prayer,
That a' the blessings mortals share
May be, by turns,
Dispens'd with an indulgent care
To Robert Burns

Many of the poets, because of their class, sought emigration: thus the horse-breaker Will Ogilvie (1869-1963) is better known in Australia than here; Thomas Pringle (1789-1834), although trained as a clerk in Kelso, became a farmer in South Africa (and a leading abolitionist) and James McIntyre (1828-1906) found fame not in his native Forres but as the "Cheese Poet of Ingersoll, Ontario": not all the poets are equal to Burns but McIntyre could give McGonagall a run for his money:

Ode to the Mammoth Cheese Weighing Over 7,000 Pounds
We have seen thee, Queen of Cheese,
Lying quietly at your ease,
Gently fanned by evening breeze;
Thy fair form no flies dare seize.
All gaily dressed, soon you'll go
To the provincial show,
To be admired by many a beau
In the city of Toronto.

Some poets never attempted a national or international audience: James Ruickbie (1757-1828) seemed quite content to be well-known around Hawick. By turns a miller, a toll-keeper and the publican of the Harrow Inn in Hawick, he was nevertheless sought out by Thomas Campbell (the author of The Pleasures of Hope and the once-famous Gertrude of Wyoming) and Allan Cunningham, the stonemason poet and friend of Burns. His poems of the Death and Resurrection of Whisky are a treat, as is his "Address to the Critics":

O ye lang-nebbit pryin' race
Who kittle words an' letters trace
Up to their vera risin' place
An' not a point
But ye maun put it to disgrace
If out o' joint

Ye're unco wise as ye suppose
An' mang poor scribblers deal your blows
Slap dash ye rin through verse and prose
Wi' piercin' look
An' never spit nor blow your nose
But by the book

Let poor folk write to ane anither
The way they learn'd it frae their mither
Or some auld aunt's loquacious swither
O' wit and glee
Wha valu'd not your college spither
An' rigmarie

There have been valiant attempts to consider properly this heritage, notably Tom Leonard's Radical Renfrew and a book I can't praise enough, Walter Elliot's New Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border 1805-2005, which analyses huge amount of poems published in local newspapers and chapbooks. It was Elliot who first introduced me to poets like Andrew Scott of Bowden (1757-1839), a farm-worker and church beadle who, as well as praising his local landscape, and tobacco, imagined a six-hour hot-air balloon flight service between Edinburgh and London, and Roger Quin (1850 -1918), a "gentleman of the road" or "milestone inspector" – in other words, a homeless poet – who now has a row of new houses named after him in Galashiels.

My final poet, however, didn't write much in the Scots language, but his work shows how even minor writers can have major afterlives: William Knox (1789–1825), who euphemistically "fell a victim to the undue gratification of his social propensities". There was a plaque to him in Lilliesleaf Kirk, where I worshipped as a child, and I knew the lines from his most famous poem, "Mortality", off by heart.

OH, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?
Like a swift-fleeting meteor, a fast-flying cloud,
A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave,
Man passeth from life to his rest in the grave.

It was only much later I learned that these were Abraham Lincoln's favourite lines of poetry, and that they were so highly regarded by one of the Tsars (the reference is obscure) that he had them engraved on a golden panel. Even more impressively, it was quoted as an epitaph for The Flash (Barry Allen) in DC Comics Crisis On Infinite Earths #8. Not quite as famous as "Auld Lang Syne", but not bad.

Robert BurnsPoetryBurns NightStuart Kelly
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Piracy is yesterday's worry for today's 'artisan authors'

File sharing and self-publishing are becoming the norm for a generation of writers looking beyond a moribund publishing eco-system

The community of SF writers has reason to dislike digital copying, or "piracy" as it's commonly labelled in the tabloid press. Genre writers exist, by and large, in the publishing mid-list, where mediocre sales might seem most easily eroded by the spectre of illegitimate downloads. SF, fantasy and horror are also the literature of choice for the culture of geeks most likely to share their favourite authors' works on torrent sites. Not surprising, then, that many professional genre writers and editors respond to the growing reality of copying with the absolutist position that piracy is theft, and should be punished as such under the law.

But SF writers are far from united in that position. Novelist, blogger and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow is well known for providing free digital copies of all his books as a marketing strategy, arguing that in a digital economy, obscurity is a far greater threat than piracy. Charlie Stross blogged such an effective argument against digital rights management on ebooks that it influenced at least one publishing imprint to drop DRM on its novels. And interviewed on the subject in 2011, Neil Gaiman, ever the gentleman, kindly points out that if you are a writer courting fans, screaming "THIEF!" at them and threatening legal action for copying might be … counterproductive.

Of course the easy response is that Doctorow, Stross and Gaiman are all successful writers who can afford to hold such opinions. But like most easy responses, it misses the fundamentals of the argument. Successful writers understand the marketplace they are working within, and they understand that digital copying and file-sharing, like all disruptive changes wrought by technology, create as many opportunities as problems. The digital economy operates on the model of the long tail, and copying is part of how a book or any digital creation moves up the tail. Copying and file-sharing are the internet's word of mouth – and as all good booksellers know, it's word of mouth that really sells books.

It's at the confluence of file-sharing and self-publishing that a new kind of "artisan author" is emerging. In his guide to self-publishing, Guy Kawasaki with co-author Shawn Welch coins the term APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur. Kawasaki argues that by fulfilling all three roles, writers open tremendous new creative opportunities for their work that major publishers are too slow and cumbersome to meet. Self-published writer Huw Howey, whose collection of SF novellas, Wool, became an ebook bestseller before it was published by Century and the film rights bought by Ridley Scott, says that he and the pirates "are tight"; he loves his readers, "even the ones with eye patches". For a self-published author like Howey, downloads from torrent sites aren't a sale lost but a reader gained, the sites themselves not dens of piracy but places where people who are fans of cool stuff go looking for new cool stuff to be fans of. For the artisan author, self-publishing is a preference and file-sharing is an opportunity.

Creative control is the lure for the artisan author. Want to hand-make limited editions of your book and sell them on Etsy? You can. Want to find a kick-ass illustrator on deviantART to make your cover? You can. Want to set up a Kickstarter to fund the next volume of your epic fantasy saga? You can. Want to make a marketing deal with a sponsor who likes you brand? You can. Want to put copies of your book on Pirate Bay to find new readers? You can. The options open to artisan authors are huge, and the potential for creativity truly exciting. In the past, writers have relied on publishers to make these creative decisions for them, but the changes in digital publishing mean that many writers are not just creatively but financially better off either going it alone or negotiating new kinds of relationships with publishers.

If the rise of the ebook and the growth of file-sharing are a huge meteorite careening towards Planet Publishing, then the artisan authors are gambling on being the fast, adaptable mammals who will crawl out from the rubble of Random House and feast like cannibals on the dismembered careers of dying mid-list writers and their editors. If the artisan authors are right, then file-sharing is the least of the problems traditional authors face. They are tied to a publishing eco-system that may simply be too big and too slow to adapt to the extinction-level event of digital technology.

Science fictionFictionSelf-publishingPublishingPiracyDamien Walter
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Why Amazon can't win when it comes to book reviews

The sock puppet theatre seems set for a record-breaking run

Amazon's sales figures over Christmas reaffirmed its supremacy in online bookselling, but in one of its myriad activities – its role as a forum for criticism – it seems that it just can't win: when it's not coping with a brouhaha caused by aggressive reviews, Jeff Bezos's behemoth is provoking protests by removing flattering ones, and also by not removing them.

The first of several recent crises occurred in September, when detective work by another author exposed the award-winning British crime writer RJ Ellory, who (recalling the online misdemeanours of the historian Orlando Figes) had used the "sock puppet" alias Nicodemus Jones on Amazon to attack rivals.

Nicodemus Jones also gave Ellory's own work five stars (one book was deemed "a modern masterpiece"), however, and it was log-rolling, not nasty notices, that evidently preoccupied Amazon's monitors over the following months.

In a crackdown, reviews were deleted without notification – often several by the same reviewer – on grounds only later explained: writers were no longer allowed to comment on others in the same genre, and the guidelines also barred reviews written by "a person or company with a financial interest in the product". Some rave reviews by family members and friends disappeared too, with Amazon's ability to identify them as such seen as sinister.

That their efforts to clean up its sock puppet theatre haven't gone far enough is made clear by the latest scandal, in which hostile postings are back with a vengeance. Instead of one-on-one takedowns the issue now is organised, collective assault – the converse of barely concealed social media campaigns promoting books, in which fans are mobilised to pen puffs by publicists or authors themselves.

Randall Sullivan's Michael Jackson biography Untouchable was targeted by a group calling themselves Michael Jackson's Rapid Response Team to Media Attacks, whose hatchet jobs ensured that it had an ultra-low star rating and contributed to its poor sales. When challenged, Amazon appeared unconcerned, saying the fans had not breached its guidelines (although relatively positive responses now head Untouchable's reviews on both amazon.com and amazon.co.uk, suggesting action might have been quietly taken).

While it retains the star system and continues to allow aliases, Amazon seems bound to find itself continually closing down one source of controversy only for another to emerge. Just as bizarre as its ruling in the Untouchable row, the New York Times's David Streitfeld suggests, was its attitude to a cookbook by the self-help author Tim Ferriss, who openly solicited reviews by his social media followers before most could possibly have read it. A problem? Not for Amazon, whose spokesman said "we do not require people to have read the product in order to review".

John Dugdale
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Last call for 2013's new writing talent in the north

Leave your garrets! Stop fussing over semi-colons! Work out how to add an attachment to email! There's £40,000 up for grabs for literature's leading northern lights - and the deadline is getting very tight

Writers across the north of England have just a week left to get their submissions in for the Northern Writers' Awards, the leading talent development scheme for writers in the region. Writers can submit their work in development and hope to win a share of the £40,000 prize fund.

Created in 2000 by the literature development agency New Writing North, the Northern Writers' Awards have this year expanded to embrace writers from the entire north of England, and not just the north east as previously. There's twice as much money in prizes thanks to a new partnership with Northumbria University, and also mentoring, critical feedback, networking opportunities and introductions to agents and publishers. The entry deadline is 5pm on 31 January and submissions must be made online here.

Authors of crime fiction, children's novelists, short story, poetry or prose writers are all encouraged to apply.

At the same time, New Writing North has been at the forefront of fighting against proposed cuts to library services in Newcastle as reported on in the Guardian recently.

Claire Malcolm, chief executive of New Writing North, says:

It's ironic that at the same time as we're lobbying councils and government to re-think drastic cuts to arts and library budgets, both of which will disproportionately affect writers, we're also giving away a big sum of money to support writers achieve their career goals.

We know the difference a relatively small amount of seed money can make to the careers and ambitions of talented new writers, and we're really excited to be able to offer that to a wider group of writers this year for the first time.

New and established writers alike are being encouraged to apply for the awards, which are now open to wordsmiths from all over the three northern regions – from Carlisle to Castleford, Leeds to Liverpool and Humberside to Tyneside.

As a testament to the awards' previous success at developing talented new writers at an early stage of their careers, two major figures of the contemporary northern literary scene have agreed to become patrons of the awards – Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage and the Booker Prize-winning novelist Pat Barker, who is based in Durham.

Simon Armitage says:

To an emerging writer, an award of this kind can often be the difference between carrying on and giving up, and can be a huge boost to confidence as well as providing financial backing. Many writers, like myself, can look back to an award or bursary at an early stage in their career as being the pivotal moment, one that gave them the courage and means to continue.

For new writers, winning a Northern Writers' Award can help them to get noticed by agents and publishers and on to the first rung towards publication. For established writers, the awards can buy time to write to undertake major new projects.

Winners will follow in the footsteps of Toby Martinez de la Rivas, who was mentored by poet Gillian Allnutt before being selected to be part of Faber and Faber's New Poets project, which included participation in a UK tour and the publication of his first chapbook.

Other success stories include award-winners Carolyn Jess-Cooke, Mari Hannah and Niel Bushnell, who met their respective agents through the awards and went on to become published writers.

Olivia Chapman is marketing and communications manager at New Writing North. Full details about the awards are here.

Simon ArmitagePat BarkerAwards and prizesNewcastleLeedsLiverpoolSheffieldManchesterGreater ManchesterNorthumbria University
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Who should play Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell?

The RSC is set to stage Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. But who should play the ruthless master politician at the novels' core?

So the deal is done and the Cromwellian bandwagon has embarked on the next phase of its journey – from page to stage. The extent to which the first two parts of Hilary Mantel's trilogy have rehabilitated one of the arch-villains of British history is now part of literary history. But who is man enough to carry the name of Thomas Cromwell forth onto the boards, in the RSC's imminent adaptation of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies? Gregory Doran, the RSC's artistic director, says that he has the perfect actor in mind for the role – but for the moment his lips are sealed. "I wish I could tell you," he said tantalisingly yesterday.

Which set us thinking. It is a tricky – as well as fascinating – challenge for any actor. Cromwell was a Putney blacksmith's son who rose to the highest political position in the land, chief minister to Henry VIII, before finding himself on the wrong side of the succession game being played out by an increasingly desperate king. So applicants must be able to suggest unbleached wool while wearing velvet with swagger.

Cromwell was smart enough to lurk in the shadows of power, rather than strutting about the court, which might suggest he'd be most interestingly played by one of our great character actors – a John Shrapnel rather than a Jonathan Pryce – but, unfortunately, he was also executed at the age of 55, which rules both out on grounds of age. And Doran's ideal is a "slightly cushioned" actor, which narrows the field still further.

Yesterday, commenters pitched in, suggesting everyone from Dominic West to Rufus Sewell, both of whom could be excellent choices. But – assuming the ink on the RSC contract isn't yet dry – here are a few suggestions of our own …

Ken Stott

If casting were for visual credibility, Stott would be a shoo-in (just look at the famous large-scale Holbein portrait, now in the National Portrait Gallery). His Rebus demonstrates the rueful intelligence that is part of the Cromwell persona, but he's a bit too north-of-the-border for this scion of the Southwark streets.
 

Stephen Fry

Has the right sort of bombast for the power years, and is certainly well-cushioned, but lacks the common touch and is definitely not the lurking sort. Probably a better Wolsey.

Simon McBurney:

The founder of Theatre de Complicité is a proven shape-shifter, who would have no trouble suggesting the multiple identities of the shrewd administrator and ruthless political operator who was also a loyal family man.

Robert Lindsay

A tempting outside bet. Although best known these days for the cosy sitcom My Family, he has a much more dangerous theatrical CV. He is confident playing characters of humble origin, and intriguers, and is no stranger to the RSC, having played an acclaimed Richard III. For Cromwell's Machiavellian tendencies, he could perhaps draw on his experience playing Michael Murray, the Liverpool militant, in Alan Bleasdale's GBH.

David Morrissey

Now we're talking. An actor who looks like a policeman (and indeed has played a few in his time), but with the sort of ambushing charisma that must have been part of Cromwell's armoury, as he snaked his way up the corridors of power. He made a very credible Gordon Brown, so is no stranger to the twists and turns of the political mind.

Fiona Shaw

Right age, right stature, and a proven ability to man up to any role she's offered, regardless of gender. Possibly more of a king than a courtier, but if Mantel's audacious historical revisionism is what this production wants to convey, then who knows … Unfortunately, Doran did say: "Common sense suggests it needs to be a man."

TheatreHilary MantelClaire Armitstead
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