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The Rathbones Folio Prize
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Jan 26, 2022 08:14AM
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Very impressive list including the two we mourned for their Women's Prize non-eligibility ............China Room and Magician get two listings in a week (with this and the Walter Scott)
Like I suspect many of us I have read all 6 of the fiction books (there is also a poetry collection and a non-fiction book)
Assembly, Natasha Brown
The Promise, Damon Galgut
Men Who Feed Pigeons, Selima Hill
Albert and the Whale, Philip Hoare
Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan
My Phantoms, Gwendoline Riley
China Room, Sunjeev Sahota
The Magician, Colm Tóibín
Longlist A Little Devil in America, Hanif Abdurraqib
Checkout 19, Claire-Louise Bennett
Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch, Rivka Galchen
The Nutmeg’s Curse, Amitav Ghosh
Palmares, Gayl Jones
Notes on the Sonnets, Luke Kennard
Everybody, Olivia Laing
Sea State, Tabitha Lasley
My Body, Emily Ratajkowski
Beautiful World, Where Are You?, Sally Rooney
Amnion, Stephanie Sy-Quia
A Year in the New Life, Jack Underwood
So the longlist = books not on the shortlistGreat to see Assembly and Small Things Like These on the list and a prize that doesn't have a size fixation
I've read 5 of the fiction, not the Toibin which I don't plan to. Philip Hoare does like his whale books doesn't he! He's an author I ought to like but I didn't like England's Lost Eden at all (albeit 10+ years ago) so have written him off ever since.
I think the longlist is the near misses - the full list is almost by statute around 80 booksI recall (I think) the group being generally lukewarm to China Room - I am a bit surprised to see it on both lists this week
Paul wrote: "Great to see ... a prize that doesn't have a size fixation..."If only we could say the same for all of the posters on this forum .......
It’s good to see Hanif Abdurraqib on this list. Ohioan are proud of Ohio and Mr. Abdurraqib is from our capital city, Columbus.
I would say Ohio is the Norfolk of the US, but I have no idea if that’s an apt comparison or not. Perhaps it’s the Wiltshire.
Perhaps Ohio (part of the "flyover" portion of the US) is the Lake District? Abdurraqib's non-fiction book is very good.
Is Ohio a flyover state? I don’t think so because we border a Great Lake, Cleveland has a world class art museum, one of the best orchestras, one of the best hospitals in the country, and a top university, we also have OSU, and we are hugely important to presidential elections. No Republican has won the White House without winning Ohio.I looked it up. More people fly to Ohio, than fly over Ohio so we are not a flyover state.
What our equivalent is in England I couldn’t say.
Scotland? Has those world class type things and a similarish sizeIncidentally politically Ohio seems to have moved away from being a swing state. Trump won easily while losing the national vote. A Ducks,Newburyport backlash is one suggestion I have heard.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/10/po...
Cleveland is definitely not flyover but maybe the rest of the state? Some in Cleveland think the state is flyover -- https://www.cleveland.com/politics/20....
The judges “flew over” the Ohio book as it wasn’t on the shortlist anyway.
Columbus, where Hanif Abdurraqib is from, is an underrated city - lots going on and growing. I'm not going to say what we call Cleveland in Chicago.
I googled flyover and they had numbers for how many flights went over a state and how many flight landed in a state. Ohio had more flight to than over. We are losing swing states as we lose our democracy. Republican led states have gerrymandered out an entire Democratic district in one state and made it impossible for Democrats to win in others, they’ve replaced bi-partisan election boards with only Republicans and changed laws to allow election boards to throw out votes. Republicans have gone state by state to see what helped black and poor people vote easier and eliminated or severity limited access for those methods of voting.
The Ohio Supreme Court overruled the first attempt to gerrymander the state, so we’re waiting to see what the Republicans present next.
We are seeing books banned and teachers are threatened with fines it they say anything about black history that makes white kids uncomfortable.
It is not hyperbole to say that the US is facing very dark days, there will be a lot more blood shed, probably more violent protests, bombings, and eventually public figures will get shot.
Columbus is a great city, especially for young people, lots to do and of course it’s the home of OSU.
We call Chicago the Windy City, I’m guessing people in Chicago call Cleveland the city with culture and super friendly people.
With everything that you mentioned, Wendy, To Paradise was not an encouraging read.Back to the prize... when is the winner announcement expected?
As per further up the thread the 23 March.
With everything I mentioned I’m feeling less and less able to concentrate on books, the same thing happened in the pandemic months of 2020 even though now I am not doom scrolling. Even without checking Twitter too often, just knowing it is incredibly stressful. Sorry to bring this up. I guess my reading plans must be tweaked and I’ll read whatever I captures my hard to capture attention now.
So on a shortlist with two powerful compact novels like Assembly and Small Things Like these - the judges pick The Magician - 498 pages of lightly fictionalised biography 2022 is clearly trying to wean me off literary prizes.
I am elated. It was my favorite book published last year, though I am in the minority among my GR friends.
Pleased for you Vesna.
Another Golden Reviewer Prize of the Year contender is eliminated.Perhaps the Mookse and Gripes Best Translated Novel (*) of 2021 will take the award>
(* defined as a book of less than 100 pages that calls itself a novel even if it is non-fiction)
What happened to the Paul Fulcher Short and Brilliant Prize award idea?
Although bit harsh to call me short - I'm 1.75m if I wear thick socks
Not the Short and Brilliant Paul Fulcher Prize, the PF Short and Brilliant Prize, I should add For Novels.
Yes a novel - a book of less than 100 pages. 120 words qualifies. The Outsider should be compulsory reading in MFA courses - "if the author of that needs 120 words why do you need 120,000?"
As it were, yesterday I looked at the New Directions catalog for this year and no less than 5 books ("novels") in translation fit Paul's criteria. And if we count on his benevolent side with a potential generous allowance for up to 150 pages, then 10 out of 16 fit the bill. There is another Krasznahorkai coming out (80 pp.). I do wonder if they are Paul's secret followers on GR :-)
Quite a few of those out already in UK - Yesterday (Peirene), The Employees (Lolli Editions), Paradais (Fitzcarraldo), Alindarka's Children (Scotland Street)Interesting they've some short Peter Weiss - since The Aesthetics of Resistance is definitely NSFP
The TLS's NB column (sort of book gossip) suggests that we ought to have been able to guess the winner given the chair of judges.NB I will say Michael Hoffman is a bit of a hatchet-job reviewer.
Colm Tóibín has won this year’s Rathbones Folio prize for his novel The Magician – a novel described in this paper (by Michael Hofmann, September 10, 2021) as a “soap opera, tedious and poorly told and lacking insight and accuracy to them as know, breathless and arbitrary and inconsequential to others”.
Another critic, Tessa Hadley, disagrees. She had already called The Magician a “masterpiece”, well before, as chair of the Rathbones Folio judging panel, announcing that it had won the prize, which happens to be worth £30,000. Tóibín’s previous novels include The Master (now available with an introduction by Tessa Hadley) and Nora Webster (“it does everything we ask of a great novel” – Tessa Hadley, writing in the Guardian). When the New Yorker profiled Tóibín last September, they found somebody – guess who – to marvel at his ability, “with that striking minimum expressiveness”, to “stick so faithfully to the inner qualities of his places and his characters”. We marvel at such things, too. Nothing against either writer, you understand. Only – isn’t it somebody else’s turn?
I respect Hoffmann as a translator but I remember that I was very puzzled when I read his TLS review last year. Not much of substance except for a couple of randomly, out of context, picked quotes, if I remember correctly. Mostly sweeping and ferociously negative statements that made me wonder if he even read the book or if there was some personal acrimony going on between him and Tóibín.
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Mohamed posted some details to General Book News although I suggested he post here also. As you will see from the long trail above over many years the Folio always seems like a prize still trying to find its purpose including taking a lengthy hiatus and changing its approach on several occasions.
There are some Interesting aspects to it - both the good idea of the Academy to help decide the list of titles for the judges to read and with a generous sponsor.
Splitting into different categories is a reverse of what they did a few years ago but dies seem like a worthy attempt to fill the prize void of the Costa.
What is ironical is that the Prize was first set up in direct response to a belief that in the Stella year the Booker had gone too commercial (as was the Goldsmith but that has stuck to its original aims)… and yet of course the Costa was deliberately aimed at readable/enjoyable books.
So let’s see how this latest iteration plays out but it’s a promising judging panel.
Odd choice to announce same day as the Booker list. Unless they were hoping for a rubbish list and so a backlash (given that is how the prize was born).
I had to double check what this prize awards, it’s simply the “best” fiction regardless of form.
Shortlist out this week from a prize which looks to be consciously trying to fill some of the void left behind by discontinued prizes. As a reminder
- Prize is English language and UK publication
- Poetry, short stories and non fiction explicitly included - only Children’s literature explicitly ruled out
- it’s a calendar year prize eligibility so 2022 in this case
- The initial 60 nominees are by Folio Academy members so effectively a list of writers and critics (https://www.rathbonesfolioprize.com/t...)
- Each Academy member gets three nominations and they are then ranked 3/2/1 with the 60 highest ranked books getting to the judges (there are a few tiebreak rules and in practice more than 60 might go forwards even after tie breaks)
- the judges can then call in books to make the total to 80
So it’s really like taking all of those Book of The Year features in things like TLS, New Statesman, Guardian etc which feature literary figures and aggregating their rankings
Of course then the judges get to pick from those
Additional complexity this year is that there are separate judges and 4 book shortlists for each of fiction, poetry and non fiction. No idea what they do if the 60 books are very weighted for or against one category or if the call in choices are evenly divided up. But you have to assume the fiction list the judges see is in the 20-30 book range which is small and most are likely to be well known books.
Any thoughts on what might be there. From end of year lists I can imagine that The Colony, Tresspasses, The Trees m, Seven Moons and maybe Young Mungo, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies made it to the judges. Maybe even The Exhibitionist.
Are there separate judges - thought same three for each? Or does each judge get to judge one category personally?Interesting point that the method of tallying votes favours 'best of' type selections particularly if they equally weigh entries into categories.
My mistake I assumed these were the just the three Fiction judges but you are right they are judging all 3 categories.
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer wrote: "My mistake I assumed these were the just the three Fiction judges but you are right they are judging all 3 categories."Which is different to the Costa and will make picking an overall winner easier.
Financially the focus is very much on the overall winner - 2k for the 3 category winners (I think zero for shortlisting) additional 30k for the overall winner.
Glory - NoViolet BulawayoPure Colour - Sheila Heti
Emergency - Daisy Hildyard
Lucy by the Sea - @LizStrout
Scary Monsters - Michelle de Kretser
Not read the last.
Hard to assess which direction this is going vs the Booker.
Folio has never had a direction really
Great to see a Fitzcarraldo fiction on a non translated list. It was a fascinating book even if I wasn’t sure it entirely worked (the lockdown parts didn’t totally fit). Glory a bit the same (the flawed central conceit). So is the direction interesting if flawed books (which has sometimes been the Goldsmiths approach). Do the other 3 fit that?
I don’t know if Pure Colour fits that description but it seems to be a book people either love or hate.
It’s completely coo coo
And hopefully the @lizstrout persona writes more interesting books that her other pseudonym Elizabeth Strout? Sort of like Elizabeth Strout novels but with a bit of Liz Truss chaos thrown in?
I don't deny that there have been some nice books on their shortlist over the years, but it seems as if they [mostly published authors, yes?] just want to be able to give an award to someone (someone's book) whom they believe to have been unjustly ignored by other awards. Thus the ever-changing ambit of the award.
The Mookse and the Gripes
Books mentioned in this topic
Scary Monsters (other topics)The Outsider (other topics)
To Paradise (other topics)
In the Dream House (other topics)
The Appointment (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Hanif Abdurraqib (other topics)Hanif Abdurraqib (other topics)
Carmen Maria Machado (other topics)
Monique Roffey (other topics)
Carmen Maria Machado (other topics)
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