THE WHITBREAD BOOK AWARDS 2005

Writer — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 11:03:38 +0000

The Whitbread is one of the longest established and esteemed book awards in the UK and celebrates some of the most enjoyable books published in the UK each year across a number of different genres.

There are six awards in total – five category awards (Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s) and, from these, one overall winner – the Whitbread Book of the Year.

Ali Smith Won Whitbread Novel Award 2005 for her work The Acceidental.

This year the awards attracted 476 entries – the highest total ever – and included a record number of entries in the Biography and First Novel categories with 114 and 80 books submitted respectively. Each category’s shortlist was chosen by a panel of judges, who this year included writer and broadcaster John Humphrys; authors Philippa Gregory, Margaret Drabble and Linda Newbery; comedy writer and performer Arabella Weir and CBBC children’s presenter Lizo Mzimba.

Since the introduction of the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1985, it has been won seven times by a novel, three times by a first novel, four times by a biography, five times by a collection of poetry and once by a children’s book.

Novel Award
Renowned writer Ali Smith won the Whitbread Novel Award 2005 for her first full-length novel The Accidental. It is the portrayal of a 12-year-old girl. Astrid is spending the summer in a holiday home with her family in Norfolk. It is a substandard house in a substandard town and she knows for sure nothing is going to happen there all substandard summer. So she starts filming the dawn breaking each morning on her Sony digital camera. Essentially a modern-day reworking of Pasolini’s 1968 film Theorem, this remarkable novel is at once dazzlingly bright and profoundly dark.

About The Accidental, Whitbread Award judges said: “This extraordinary novel of family life combined humour, sadness and mystery with a wonderful linguistic playfulness and invention.”

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. Her first book, Free Love, won the Saltire First Book Award. She is also the author of Like (1997); Other Stories And Other Stories (1999); Hotel World (2001), which was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize in 2001 and won the Encore Award, the East England Arts Award of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award in 2002; The Whole Stories and Other Stories (2003) and The Accidental (2005). Ali Smith also writes for the Guardian, the Scotsman and the TLS.

First Novel Award
Tash Aw wins the Whitbread First Novel Award for his novel The Harmony Silk Factory. It is the story of four people: Johnny, an infamous Chinaman whose shop house, The Harmony Silk Factory, he uses as a front for his illegal businesses; Snow Soong, the beautiful daughter of one of the Kinta Valley’s most prominent families; Kunichika, a Japanese officer who loves Snow; and an Englishman, Peter Wormwood, who went to Malaysia like many English but never came back, who also loves Snow to the end of his life. A journey the four of them take into the jungle has a devastating effect on all of them, and brilliantly exposes the cultural tensions of the era.

Tash Aw was born in Taipei and brought up in Malaysia. A graduate of the University of East Anglia, he now lives in London. He began his career writing short stories. Citing his influences as Flaubert, Faulkner and Nabokov, he is now writing his second novel.

Book of the Year Award
Biographer Hilary Spurling has won the prestigious 2005 Whitbread Book of the Year award for the second part of her masterful biography of Matisse, Matisse the Master, a work which took her 15 years to complete. The announcement was made on 24 January at an awards ceremony held at The Brewery in Central London.

Matisse the Master, published by Hamish Hamilton, is the fifth biography to take the overall prize. Claire Tomalin was the last author to win the Whitbread Book of the Year with a biography taking the prize in 2002 for Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self.

Biographer Hilary Spurling was born in Stockport, England, in 1940. Educated at Somerville College, Oxford, she was arts editor, theatre critic and subsequently literary editor for The Spectator during the 1960s. She is a regular reviewer for The Observer and the Daily Telegraph.

Her first book was a biography of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, published in two volumes in 1974 and 1984. She is also the author of a biography of the novelist Paul Scott and of the painter Henri Matisse, published in two volumes in 1998 and 2005. The latter volume, Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954 (2005) won the 2005 Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2005 – Jonathan Coe Wins Non-Fiction

Writer — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 11:26:08 +0000

Jonathan Coe is the winner of the £30,000 BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2005 for his book Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of BS Johnson published by Picador.

B.S. Johnson was a brilliant working-class writer, compared to Joyce and so wedded to innovation that he cut holes in the pages of his novels. He published a novel in a box so that its unbound chapters could be read in any order. He was found dead at his north London home in November 1973.

The biography is based upon unique access to the vast collection of papers Johnson left behind, and upon dozens of interviews with those who knew him best.

Coe writes enticingly, with the quiet fever of the bookish detective, but he treads softly. He uses all manner of means – tricks straight out of Johnson’s top drawer – to ensure that we see his book for what it is: as merely one way of telling an impossible story.

There are wry footnotes and an intrusive narrator; there are disarming moments when the author declares himself too bored, or too confused, to tell us more. There is even, marshalled at the end of the book, a kind of crowd scene – a cacophony of voices, each one distilling its own essence of BSJ, with no interference from the man with the Dictaphone. The result is more than insightful. It tells you everything about the quicksand on which the biographer wobbles.

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. An award-winning novelist, biographer and critic, his novels include What a Carve Up!, The House of Sleep and The Closed Circle. He was recently made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

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