This article titled “Guardian first book award longlist ranges around the world” was written by Richard Lea, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 27th August 2010 14.32 UTC

The past vies with the future and poetry with prose on the longlist of the 2010 Guardian first book award, which was announced today. The 10 debut titles in the running for the £10,000 award range from dystopian fiction to popular psychology, and span the globe from Somalia to Finland, Kashmir to Winston Churchill’s family home in Kent.

War stalks the pages of the best-known novel on the list, Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy, which was longlisted for the Orange prize and has already won the 2010 Betty Trask award. Mohamed takes the story of her father, who left Somalia as a boy and settled in the UK after crossing Africa, and transforms it into fiction inflected by the African tradition of praise poetry. Starting as a 10-year-old boy in 1930s Somalia and journeying through Djibouti, Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt to freedom in Britain, Mohamed’s main character witnesses key moments in the African experience of the second world war and embodies the itinerant experience of the Somali community.

According to the chair of the judges, the Guardian’s literary editor Claire Armitstead, Mohamed is just one of a group of young British authors on the longlist who are expanding the territory of the novel.

“This year’s longlist brings together a younger generation of writers who have moved beyond the social realism of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, and are pushing at the boundaries of realist fiction,” she said.

Armitstead also cited Rebecca Hunt, whose novel Mr Chartwell imagines the depression that haunts both Winston Churchill and a young woman in Battersea as a huge black dog, and Ned Beauman, who explores Nazism, eugenics and entomology in Boxer, Beetle, as responding to the changes in publishing and wider society with fiction that enlarges the possibilities of the novel.

Speaking to the Guardian, Beauman, who expressed his “delight” at finding himself on the longlist, agreed that there was an impulse towards experimentation, but not necessarily in imposing what he called “the literary equivalent of recessional austerity measures”.

“Paring away plot, character, humour, lyricism, humanity is more often boring than it is bold,” he said. “The Americans know this, and indeed all I did in Boxer, Beetle was smuggle a few postmodern devices across the Atlantic, but at the moment a lot of British readers seem to be falling for this idea that the most interesting fiction has to involve rather dated Modernist self-flagellation.”

After the success of projects as various as Inglourious Basterds and The Kindly Ones, he confessed himself unworried by the difficulty of attracting readers to a story which combines the Third Reich and cockroaches. “What has emerged as a bigger obstacle is that everyone finds all the characters so horrible,” he said, “which had honestly never occurred to me when I was writing it.”

Steven Amsterdam, whose episodic novel Things We Didn’t See Coming considers how we might retain our humanity in a future ruled by environmental and technological catastrophe, and Maile Chapman, whose Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto evokes life in a 1920s Finnish asylum, are the two remaining novelists on the list.

Alexandra Harris looks back at the early 20th century through a different lens in Romantic Moderns, a study of how English writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics and composers imbued the artistic revolutions coming across the channel with a nostalgic sense of place. Daniel Swift considers the lack of imagination that powers modern warfare in Bomber County, an investigation into the death of his grandfather which was sparked by Robert Graves’s observation that the second world war produced no great poets. Basharat Peer, meanwhile, reports from the frontline of the conflict between India and Pakistan in a return to his troubled homeland of Kashmir in Curfewed Night.

Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong, an exploration of how our convictions shape our lives despite being riddled with error, and Katharine Towers’s The Floating Man, a collection of poetry haunted by music and water, complete the list.

Armitstead will be joined on the judging panel by the artistic director of the ICA, Ekow Eshun, the author Adam Foulds, the biographer Richard Holmes, the actor Diana Quick, the Guardian’s deputy editor, Kath Viner, and Stuart Broom from Waterstone’s, who will represent the views of five reading groups hosted in Waterstone’s bookshops around the country.

Last year’s winner was the Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah, for her collection of short stories, An Elegy for Easterly. She joined a roster of winners from the 12-year history of the award that includes Zadie Smith, Alex Ross and Jonathan Safran Foer.

The shortlist for this year’s prize will be announced in late October, with the winner revealed at the beginning of December.

The longlist

Fiction

Mr Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt (Fig Tree)

Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman (Sceptre)

Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam (Harvill)

Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto by Maile Chapman (Cape)

Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed (HarperCollins)

Non-fiction

Bomber County: The Lost Airmen of World War Two by Daniel Swift (Hamish Hamilton)

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz (Portobello)

Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper by Alexandra Harris (Thames & Hudson)

Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir by Basharat Peer (Harper Press)

Poetry

The Floating Man by Katharine Towers (Picador)

• All titles on the Guardian First Book Award longlist are available at a discount from the Guardian Bookshop. Go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or ring 0330 333 6846

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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The 2009 Hennessy XO Literary Awards shortlist has been announced. The competition will be judged by poet Paula Meehan and novelist Carlo Gébler.

The awards will be announced at a ceremony in Trinity College on Tuesday, 20th April 2010. On the night one eminent Irish writer will be inducted into the Hall of Fame. Previous Hall of Fame awards have gone to Hugo Hamilton, Joseph O’Connor, Anne Enright, Colum McCann and Pat McCabe.

Now in its 39th year, the competition offers four awards, First Fiction, Emerging Fiction, Emerging Poetry and the overall Hennessy XO Literary Award itself. Category winners will receive €1,500 and a specially commissioned sculpture. The winner of the overall award will be chosen from the three category winners and will receive an additional €2,500. The full list of nominees is below:

First Fiction
Rob O’Shea
Madeleine D’Arcy
Sarah O’Loughlin
John O’Donnell
Oona Frawley
Alice Redmond

Emerging Fiction
James Lawless
Andrew Fox
Michael O’Higgins
Niamh Boyce
Alison Wells
Kate Dempsey

Emerging Poetry
Michael Massey
Olive Broderick
Aideen Henry
Cathal McCabe
Helena Mulkerns
Cliona O’Connell

Lapwing Publications is a poetry press based in Belfast. It was founded by Dennis and Rene Greig in 1988. Since then it has published some of Ireland’s best known authors. IPN contacted them because they have been partners in Google’s Book program for some time. They have kindly agreed to allow us republish this piece by their co-founder Denis Greig.

So it was back to the failing conventions. One bookshop keeper informed me that ‘we don’t stock pamphlets’ – that was our main output form then. ‘Odd’ I thought as we chatted beside a mountain of poetry pamphlets. Then there was the hide them under the table trick.

I had a great computer programme but the business of setting up a website was torturous. Yes, with a bottomless pocket of cash I could have got ‘someone’ to do the business.

Then along came Google Booksearch Partners project.

Even in the earlier years, we were attracting hundreds of ‘hits’ a week. That meant up to 500 people a week were browsing our listing. Last year 14,000 plus Lapwing publications were browsed and 56,000 plus pages on Google. That is a lot of people reading a lot of poetry. Some titles have been ‘browsed’ between 1000 and 3000 plus times. And although the number of pages that can be accessed is very limited, the Booksearch has become a ‘virtual library’. Necessary now that the barbarians are threatening to close libraries in the UK and the Blackening North.

The Google site also links to major booksellers and resellers. What’s more, it is universally available, it is a worldwide shop window.

Britain and Ireland are feeling the effects of cultural changes, possibly linked or related in GB’s case to the deconstruction of education for the less wealthy children and young people. Related to that is the rise of commercialism where it is a case of quantity counts instead of ‘quality’. Oh yes, the dumb and ghost-written stuff is well produced as machine-made ‘products’ but the literary commercial culture seems to be all about cooks, crooks, tarts and old farts bumping up their pension plans. So ‘kiss and tell’ will sell. Fine, as long as it lasts. The problem is one of confusing public opinion with ‘taste’. Then again a recent study suggests that 5% of poets actually buy poetry books and of those 65% tend to be Heaney titles followed by Simon Armitage. I wonder how ‘they’ worked that out.

However, some 800 bookshops closed in the UK last year alone. Stalinist central buying and high discount levels demanded worked both for and against publishers. For, when people happily added gunge to their lifestyle bric-a-brac, against when the public stopped or cut buying. Why bother when the remainder shops will have the £20 stodge a a few quid a copy. The other pressure has been the simple cost of occupancy. Employers can impose impoverishing regimes on their staff but when it comes to rents, rates and other forms of official robbery, they have no option but to put up or close up. Hughes & Hughes in Ireland seem to have fallen foul of a complex of problems related to occupancy. A certain chainstore in Britain – with an Irish presence – seems to be suffering as well and if rents escalate some places will become unviable.

With Google, the shop window is lit up 24-7 as the cliché goes.

As it is, poetry is a non-commercial venture. Almost 100 years ago, Ezra Pound helped print his own 200 copy edition of Il Lume Spento in Italy. Des O’Grady did likewise!

The market saturation point in Ireland is about 200 to 300 copies and usually a lot less. So, without state grant aid, there would be a lot less published. Granted the overseas market – not Europe I must add – may subsidise the home based business. Gains can be made by farming out work to India and China. Still, it is essential that traditonal publishers continue to be subsidised even if it means the perceived great and good get the lion’s share – at least it is a form of tokenism, a veneer on the masses who don’t read poetry or ‘fine’ literature and the embellishment of icons emerging poets may aspire to emulate.

Distribution tends to be in a few hands so independent bookshops throughout Ireland cannot obtain what distributors do not have on their shelves. The only other alternative is to use the internet to acquire books on order from customers. Yes, the big shops can do that and yes, a Kindle or iPod ebook reader can give access to a load of titles. That is another kind of distribution, the ins and out of which are still wriggling on the floor. Postage and distribution costs are high, so Lapwng offers titles that don’t need toys for boys and girls, simple PDF files and each title at a fraction of hard copy prices.

Finally, which is only a deferred finality, along came freewebs and Adam Rudden, a bright and brilliant young man who put together my attempt at site building, trimmed and polished and continues to develop the Lapwing ‘presence’. He also is making the best use of Google. The changes around us are happening whilst we sleep, ‘measure our lives with coffee spoons’ to paraphrase T.S.Eliot. In the meantime, in the parallel universe of corporate literary culture, retrenchment and a closing of doors is very evident by the cuts in ‘arts’ budgets and the continued Philistine philosophy around literature, if it doesn’t sell dump it. That is what is happening with ‘fine’ literature. It is not a matter of state organisations flooding the ‘industry’ with cash – it is obvious that small publishers and para-literary publications will be ignored. It would be simply a case of the same old song and same old singer blinged up a bit for the modern market. It will certainly not be a case of liberty, equality and fraternity for the establishment’s barricades are well and truly up already.

Dennis Greig

Events On Thursday 18th March 2010
Event: Little Island Official Launch
Venue: Pearse Street Library
Time: 5.00pm
Price: Free but subject to invite (contact Little Island)

Speaking on the first day of the Dublin Book Festival at the Séamus Brennan Memorial Seminar on Irish Publishing, Editor of the Irish Pages journal, Irish-American poet Chris Agee, said that Irish Pages was the equal of any journal on the international scene, proclaiming, ‘we are not second fiddle to Granta’.

Speaking about how Irish Pages saw itself and its position in the world of literature, Agee, who was short-listed last week for the Ted Hughes Award, admitted to some problems saying ‘over the last 8 years that we’ve been doing this journal there is considerable resistance within Britain to be being treated as equal. They just assume in London that anything in Belfast is a backwater, ipso facto anything in Ireland cannot rival the TLS or the LRB.’

But Agree said that he and his colleagues at Irish Pages rejected this, ‘basically our project is to say no, we are not second fiddle and a lot of English and British writers, who we publish, about a quarter of our publication is from Britain, are seeing that because we are very different.’

Agee compared the identity and brand of Irish Pages to illy coffee, ‘I would say illy is the model. Yes it is Italian, yes it comes from a small family firm in Trieste, and Trieste is a small provincial Italian city, but it competes with everything else on its own terms, not because it’s Italian and we’re competing because of the writing, because of the interest not because it’s Irish.’

Agee was speaking on a panel with Clodagh Feehan of Mercier Press and Lisa Hyde of Irish Academic Press, the panel was chaired by Jean Harrington of Maverick House. Discussion title for the seminar was: Irish Literary and Cultural Publishing: Obstacles and Opportunities

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