The Guardian's Blog, page 40

Why it’s right that a Jimmy Savile biography won this year’s Gordon Burn prize

Rejected by publishers until after Savile’s death, Dan Davies’s In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile is a courageous account – Burn would have applauded it

The Gordon Burn prize was set up in the wake of the premature death in 2009 of one of the most original and fearless British authors of his generation, a visionary literary figure with an intuitive understanding of our hidden dreams and nightmares. Burn’s writing on art, music, celebrity, sport and crime, as well as his fiction, is becoming more relevant by the day.

On Friday, this year’s prize was awarded in Durham town hall to Dan Davies for In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile, his portrait of a man who will surely haunt generations to come. I remember taking Davies’s book proposal forward as an editor at Faber in 2009, and there being incredulity at these allegations about a celebrated public figure.

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Celeste Ng is right: authors shouldn't feel forced to respond to readers

The award-winning writer kicked up a storm by asking teachers not to tell students to email her – but readers shouldn’t feel entitled to an author’s reply

Email and social media have become so integrated in our lives, it can be difficult to discern the exact amount of labour that goes into responding to an email or tweet. While for many of us – including newly minted freelance writers such as myself – our email load won’t rise to an overbearing level, it’s a different matter for authors.

On Wednesday, Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You, which won Amazon’s book of the year award, simply tweeted a request to teachers not to assign emails to authors. In a series of explanatory tweets to angry users, who tweeted to chide her for being “selfish” and tell her that students should stop reading her book, Ng patiently explained that a teacher required students to obtain a quote from her in order to receive full credit.

Teachers: please, please, please don't assign your students to email an author and ask questions. It's not fair to us or to them.

I try to reply to all, but sometimes can't. A kid's grade shouldn't depend on the author being able to reply. https://t.co/9vTQJTJ58A

@RussTop3Ever @petersagal @pronounced_ing Her point isn't "I hate my fans." It's "Don't make your lesson plan contingent on my free labor."

Yes! Genuine responses are a huge gift & I try to write back. But I don't want my slow response to = bad grade. https://t.co/ROYrMXcNnK

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Leading biographers raise a glass to Michael Holroyd at 80th birthday celebrations

Jenny Uglow, Richard Holmes and Patrick French were among authors to praise Holroyd for his wit and insight at a Royal Society of Literature event

Michael Holroyd turned 80 in August, but a group of fellow biographers - displaying a perturbing collective propensity to deviate from the facts of an author’s life, it might be felt - nonetheless celebrated his birthday this week in a Royal Society of Literature event chaired by Hermione Lee, with Holroyd in the front row. They began by quoting favourite passages from his essays and lives of Lytton Strachey, Bernard Shaw and Augustus John, and identifying aspects of his work that had been inspirational for them and others, while carefully avoiding the word “legacy” (Lee acknowledged the risk of such a tribute becoming “a hagiography or obituary” when its subject was “sitting right there”).

For Jenny Uglow, whose subjects have included Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth and Charles II, Holroyd had shown that, instead of having to be weighty and stuffy, biographies “could be alive, funny, penetrating, about people and stories, not afraid to focus on the private self”. Richard Holmes (Shelley, Coleridge) admired his books as “a celebration of certain kinds of liberal values like tolerance and wit”, and as reflecting life’s authentic texture as a blend of “tragedy and comedy”; he also praised the “paradoxical” quality of his writing, the way its “high style can express simple, direct truths”.

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Reading cities: books about Toronto

Built by immigrants, permanently overshadowed by its close neighbour New York and a bit self-obsessed, Toronto shines in fiction. Chris Michael introduces us to the Canadian city’s cultural personality and its literature – from Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje to the best non-fiction

Which are your favourite Toronto books? Let us know in the comments

Toronto flared briefly in the popular imagination last year. A mayor who smokes crack, bowls over a seven-term councilwoman and is challenged to an armwrestling duel by 80s WWF legend the Iron Sheik – now retired and in a wheelchair – will do that for a city. With the Rob Ford Show shelved, however, and no recent sightings of Tiny Monkey in Posh Coat, Toronto appears to have dropped back out of popular culture. The third-biggest city in North America has reverted to its reputation for being, in the words of Steve Martin, like New York without all the stuff.

But fiction has a long memory. As opposed to say, film, where Toronto regularly stands in for other locations (then, ironically, hosts an A-list festival to show off all those movies that aren’t about it), in books, the city shines. It is, after all, the great city of English Canada, a nation almost determinedly circumspect and courteous even as it boils under the lid; so perhaps it is no surprise to discover it is on the page that this still-growing metropolis’s history, vanity and occasional tragedy find their voice.

Head to the east and you find yourself in Ernest Thompson Seton territory, where that great Victorian naturalist (a favourite of Margaret Atwood’s in childhood) did the private exploring that led to his classics, Wild Animals I Have Known and Two Little Savages. Follow the ravine south from the St Clair bridge as it joins the Don proper and soon you’ll reach Bloor Street, where (with a little imagination) you can see Michael Ondaatje’s characters from In the Skin of a Lion completing the construction of the Bloor viaduct in the 1930s. Keep going and you can glimpse, on the east bank that forms Riverdale Park, the lovers and dreamers who populate the young Morley Callaghan’s novels of the 1920s, like It’s Never Over, that intense account of claustrophobic urban frustration. Move on south to Gerrard and Dundas, glance to your right, and there are Hugh Garner’s defeated Cabbagetown dwellers, sitting on the grassy slopes as they endure the Depression and wonder whether to volunteer for the war in Spain. Not far away, you’ll run into the male protagonist of Catherine Bush’s 1993 novel, Minus Time, that wonderfully Toronto-centric book; he tells us that as a 13-year-old he ran away from home and lived in the ravines, becoming briefly famous in the papers as Ravine Boy. Keep going far enough, reach the lake, make a right, and eventually you can find a major Robertson Davies character, Boy Staunton from Fifth Business, dead at the bottom of Toronto harbour, sitting in his Cadillac convertible, his mouth inexplicably filled with a large chunk of pink granite.

Margaret Atwood is the city’s furious literary champion: determined to preserve its memory and to imagine its future

The key to Toronto’s personality is its endless, self-defeating obsession with being identified as a “world-class city”

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SF discovers reason and chaos on Mars

Since HG Wells’s War of the Worlds, the genre has used the red planet as a theatre for the battle between utopian science and violent nature

Mars has always been, as cosmologist Carl Sagan wrote, a “mythic arena onto which we have projected our Earthly hopes and fears”. For the ancient Greeks, the red dot in the night sky was an aspect of Ares, god of war, who unleashed conflict when the balance was lost between Apollo – god of reason – and Dionysus, god of the irrational and chaos. This conflict between Apollonian reason and Dionysian chaos has been projected onto Mars ever since.

The canals that the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli claimed in 1877 to see on the surface of Mars were taken as evidence that, like newly industrialised nations of Europe, “Martians” might be reasoning, civilised creatures. Later observations proved the canals to be illusions, but the idea of a Martian civilisation took hold, and became the mainstay of stories about the red planet.

Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them.

Related: The Martian review – Matt Damon shines as stranded astronaut

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Svetlana Alexievich: 'Stalin and the Gulag are not history'

The new Nobel laureate, introducing Belarusian dissident Andrei Sannikov’s memoir, reminds readers that the horrors of the 20th century ‘can be started up again at a moment’s notice’

Not long ago we were Romantics. We sat in our kitchens, sang songs by Okudzhava and the other Soviet “bards” of the 60s and 70s and dreamed of freedom, but no one had any idea what freedom was. And no one knew what the people wanted. Did they really want freedom, or did they just want to be better off? With a Schengen visa, a secondhand foreign car and holidays in Egypt, by the Red Sea. And 20 different kinds of sausage and cheese. And that’s what they’d call freedom.

Related: Svetlana Alexievich wins 2015 Nobel prize in literature

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Which are the best books to read on your commute?

Nothing can ease the pain of travelling to work better than an engrossing read. Which are the books you would recommend?

Tag your photos of the books you’re reading on your commute with #GuardianBooks on Twitter and Instagram

Unless you are walking, cycling or driving yourself to work, the chances are you’ve taken refuge in a good book from the stresses and strains of public transport – because there’s no avoiding the fact that commuting sucks. Here are some starter suggestions for great reads that can help you to beat the tube and bus blues. Which are yours? Do you prefer short stories, audiobooks, podcasts? Let us know in the comments.

If you like pensive books and exceptionally beautiful language, this is for you. It’s about a journey across the Himalayas and through the human soul. Matthiessen’s unreserved honesty touches the heart, and his eloquence takes the reader back to an era where refined descriptive language was more powerful in conveying impressions and experiences than digital images.

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Svetlana Alexievich builds individual voices into a mighty chorus

The first-hand experiences she collects are painful to read, but show how suffering can bring people together

When my phone started ringing at 7.45am here in Philadelphia, I almost didn’t pick up because I knew exactly what this meant: Svetlana Alexievich, author of the book that I’ve been translating, had just won the Nobel prize. Time to go to work. I’m very glad this happened for many reasons, but most of all because it means a wider audience for the book that has crushed and transformed me as I’ve worked on it over the past year. I’m excited for how many people will join me in weeping for Alexievich’s protagonists, and perhaps come out with clearer vision.

Svetlana Alexievich began her writing career as a journalist, her interest in the ways everyday people inhabit history inspiring her polyphonic approach to non-fiction. Alexievich arranges unflinching first-hand accounts into mighty choruses, never ceasing to be amazed at “how interesting everyday life is”, at the “infinite number of human truths”. Listening to the people who lived through some of the greatest political tragedies of the 20th century, she seeks to “chase the catastrophe into the framework of the everyday and try to tell a story”.

Related: Svetlana Alexievich wins 2015 Nobel prize in literature

Related: Nobel prize in literature: Svetlana Alexievich wins 'for her polyphonic writings' – as it happened

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Everything you need to know about Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel prize in literature

The Belarusian journalist and author has explored conflict and its aftermath for more than 30 years, interviewing thousands in a quest to ‘get the closest possible approximation to real life’. Here is an introduction to her life and work

Svetlana Alexievich wins 2015 Nobel prize in literature
The news and reaction – as it happenedHer life and career, in pictures

The winner of the 2015 Nobel prize in literature, Svetlana Alexievich, is an unfamiliar name to many English-speaking readers. But her work has given voice to survivors of conflict and disaster all over the former Soviet Union, shedding light into the emotional lives of people she has met from Chernobyl to Kabul. Here are some key facts about her life and work. If you have read her, we’d love to hear from you in the comments.

This is how I hear and see the world – as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details

For the past 30 or 40 years she’s been busy mapping the Soviet and post-Soviet individual. But it’s not really a history of events. It’s a history of emotions. What she’s offering us is really an emotional world. So these historical events that she’s covering in her various books – for example the Chernobyl disaster or the Soviet war in Afghanistan – are, in a way, just pretexts for exploring the soviet individual and the post soviet individual. She’s conducted thousands of interviews with children, women and men, and in this way she’s offering us a history of a human being about whom we didn’t know that much.”

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National Poetry Day: readers dedicate poems to babies, partners, friends and goats – video

We asked you help us celebrate National Poetry Day by sending us readings of your favourite poems. Here are some of our favourite videos

Like these? Add your own and check out the rest on GuardianWitness

We’re breaking with “the tyranny of prose” this week, and turning to you, our readers, to make the most of National Poetry Day by making poems come alive. The focus of this year’s UK-wide celebration of poetry, for which you can find the full programme here, is to get you thinking, dreaming and acting like a poet. Here are some of the video dedications you shared on GuardianWitness – a mix of your own creations and your favourite poems by others.

If you’d like to join in with your own dedication, you can follow the lead of readers who’ve already shared their videos here, or by clicking on the blue “Contribute” buttons on this page. You can also follow the action on social media via the hashtag #NationalPoetryDay.

To a 6-year-old sister and the beautiful way she sees the world

An (attempted) poem for a baby daughter

WB Yeats for a husband

A Smile To Remember by Charles Bukowski for victims of domestic abuse

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