What makes a winning book?
Women's Prize for Fiction
This separation or segregation of women’s writing should be understood as part of the patriarchal control of what and who matters – and, historically, women have not.
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Just when you think you’ve had enough of detectives behaving badly, along comes Claire DeWitt. She is, frankly, a beautifully written mess.
Dick Bruna, Miffy at the gallery 1990.
Courtesy and © Mercis bv Amsterdam
Simply drawn, universally appealing. A new exhibition provides an opportunity to marvel at Miffy’s global success.
Nigerian poet J.P. Clark was activist in his writing.
Guardian Nigeria
The poet J.P. Clark was an environmental activist who stood up for his people in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta region.
Stephen King famously called Jim Thompson’s Sheriff Lou Ford ‘the Great American Sociopath.’
derrickthebarbaric/DeviantArt
The author’s novels, famous for their bleakly sociopathic depiction of American culture, testify to the insanity and abusiveness that surround us.
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Writers are often seen as solitary creatures, but there can be great benefits to collaboration.
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Fewer books will be available to South Africans, and the books remaining under copyright will be more expensive, if the country gives in to US pressure to extend its copyright term.
Many books, like ‘Charlotte’s Web,’ contain symbolism.
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Authors sometimes put deeper meanings into their stories, but really, it’s the reader who decides.
Demonstrators protest the awarding of the 2019 Nobel literature prize to Peter Handke in Stockholm, in December 2019.
Stina Stjernkvist/TT News Agency via AP
Controversy surrounding the awarding of the 2019 Nobel Prize in literature spurs a long-standing debate about the meaning of authorship and literature with new urgency.
Things to keep in mind for writers young and old.
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There is no single piece of advice that works for everyone, but here is a list that will benefit writers at every stage of their career.
Norman Douglas, photographed in Florence, Italy in 1935.
Carl Van Vetchen/Library of Congress
There’s a reason many today have never heard of Norman Douglas: After his death, more and more came forward with stories of his sexual relationships with boys, and he soon faded into obscurity.
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Holding authors responsible functions as part of academic quality control – without it we cannot hold authors accountable for shoddy research or the moral consequences of their publications.
VS Naipaul after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.
EPA
Nobel prize winning author Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was as hard on himself as on others.
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Author Sheena Kalayil writes about her global life and why she believes the BAME acronym tells people nothing about her.
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Brontëk is a rare work that encourages Brontë fans not to take the sisters too seriously.
Netflix
Science fiction has a more important job to do – it allows us to see ourselves in a new light.
‘Fifty Shades’ author E.L. James, shown signing autographs, has earned a fortune from her romance novels.
Reuters/Neil Hall
Few of them are getting rich off their books but the genre is making them more money than it used to.
Brick Lane: popularised in a novel by British writer, Monica Ali.
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Why do so many books by non-white authors find themselves in ‘global literature’?
British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro listens to a question during a press conference at his home in London on Oct. 5, 2017.
Alastair Grant/AP Photo
After learning of Ishiguro’s Nobel win, a literature professor recalls her 2006 interview with the writer in a London cafe.
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The mass generation of customised content may have very real social implications.