Hannah Beckerman's Blog
June 22, 2015
The Huffington Post Blogs
All my blogs are now featured on The Huffington Post. You can read them all here.
November 5, 2014
The Best Debut Novels of 2014
Every year thousands of debuts novels are published in the UK, struggling to get noticed by readers, reviewers and bloggers, and desperate to make that all important good first impression.
I hadn’t, in all honesty, ever thought much about whether or not a book was an author’s first until my own debut novel was published earlier this year. Having your first book on the shelves makes you inordinately (some might say obsessively) interested in the trials and tribulations of other debuts: the six-...
June 21, 2014
Midsummer Round-Up: The Year (so far) in Books
Given it’s Midsummer’s Day - and the sun is shining - it seemed a good moment to reflect on the year in books so far. There’ve been lots. Lots of truly exceptional books (February and March especially brought an embarrassment of literary riches). So I decided to pick just my best five (it was a tough job, but someone had to do it). Then, because I felt guilty about all the great books I haven’t yet got around to reading from the first half of they year, I picked the five that are sitting at t...
May 9, 2014
Married At First Sight: Will Channel 4’s New TV Show Live Happily Ever After?
Channel 4 have just announced a new television series which they describe - in the hyperbole we’ve come to expect from them - as “a groundbreaking social experiment”.
The series is called Married at First Sight and it does pretty much what it says on the tin: it takes two strangers, gets them to marry, gives them six weeks to see if they can make it work and then asks them to decide whether they want to stay together or not.
So far, so voyeuristic. Except this being Channel 4, there needs to be...
April 30, 2014
Lost for Words by Edward St Aubyn: Book Review
There’s a passage near the beginning of Lost for Words in which Malcolm Craig MP, newly appointed chair of the Elysian Prize for literature, sets out his aspirations for the committee’s eventual winner:
...young writers were the future, or at any rate, would be the future - if there were still around and being published. You couldn’t go wrong with the future... The promise of young writers was perfect as well, until they burnt out, fucked up or died - but that would be under another government...
March 30, 2014
The Mum Test: Ten Tell-tale Signs You’re Definitely A Mother
This Sunday will be my second Mother’s Day as a mum. Last year, with a five-month old who seemed to be under the impression that sleeping for more than ninety consecutive minutes (day or night) was overrated, I wasn’t sure I was even human, let alone a mum. This year, with the occasional full night’s sleep under my belt, I’m pretty sure I fulfill the brief. And here’s what I reckon are the ten true rites of maternal passage:
You no longer use a handbag. That thing you used to carry around (sty...March 7, 2014
It’s Brilliant but is it Broad? The Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlist 2014
A few days ago I blogged about my hopes for this year’s Women’s Fiction Prize longlist: that it would be take the opportunity of a new sponsor (Baileys) to reposition itself as a broader, more inclusive - dare I say it? - more populist prize. I was intrigued when one of the judges, Denise Mina, tweeted me to say that the longlist would delight me and that it was “a brilliant, broad spread of books”.
The list was announced late last night and it is, in many ways, brilliant: there are six debut...
Whose Prize Is It Anyway? My Hopes for the Bailey’s Women’s Fiction Prize 2014
On Friday 7th March, a new list will enter the cultural domain, a list that will no doubt fuel heated debate and produce many a column inch over the coming weeks.
The list is for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly known as The Orange Prize) - the only book prize open just to women.
The book bloggersphere is already providing some interesting predictions of who’ll make the grade this year, with blogs such as The Writes of Woman and A Case for Books making excellent selections of th...
February 21, 2014
10 Top Tips for Debut Authors: What Every Writer Needs to Know About Their First Time
Last week, my first novel was published. I didn’t, in all honesty, have any clue what to expect: it’s not as though there’s a training course called ‘How To Be A First-Time Novelist’ which lays out what’s going to happen. So from the vantage point of a seasoned pro (well, a published author with seven whole days of experience under their belt), I thought I’d share my top ten things every author needs to know before their first time.
Publication Day Part 1. This will not, contrary to months of...February 20, 2014
Are Books on TV Dead? Enter The Bloggersphere.
A couple of weeks ago a new book discussion programme launched. It was hosted by a popular, well-known writer and journalist, sported a well-designed, cosy set abundant in brown leather sofas and antiquarian maps, and featured a trio of telegenic women discussing their latest books.
So far, so standard, right?
Except that this book show wasn’t on TV. And it wasn’t made by a broadcaster or a production company.
This show was on Youtube and it was produced by a publisher - Pan Macmillan - in what...
