Last night at the Society of Authors annual awards ceremony, David Szalay’s debut novel, LONDON AND THE SOUTH-EAST, was announced as the winner of this year’s main Betty Trask Award of £10,000! Jonathan Cape published LONDON AND THE SOUTH-EAST as a paperback original in April and critics were so impressed by David Szalay’s powerful writing and characters that The Independent even reviewed it twice! “Startlingly good… this is a terrific debut, written in a present tense which flashes every so often into the past – a trick which Szalay pulls off with confidence.” (Bill Greenwell in The Independent, April 4th )
and ”«««««London and the South-East is a funny, painful, graphic demonstration that our job is a crucial part of our identity…It’s compulsively readable, with a strangely convincing sense that all the events, unpredictable though they are, are what really would have happened, rather than what suits the plot.” (Brandon Robshaw in The Independent on Sunday, April 13th)
So far the only foreign sale was to the excellent Dutch publisher, Mouria, who will publish in Holland this August 2008 (with the title “Can I Make You An Offer?”). David Szalay is close to delivering to his overjoyed primary agent, Anna Webber, an intriguing and even more ambitious second novel that Dan Franklin/Jonathan Cape already has under contract. More on this before Frankfurt, but now is the time to read LONDON AND THE SOUTH-EAST! I was hooked on every word and amazed by how much depth and suspense David Szalay reveals in the inner life of an ordinary London salesman who could also be a salesman in any city.
Meanwhile Jim Gill’s author, Thomas Leveritt won a Betty Trask Award for his debut novel, “The Exchange Rate of Love” (rights controlled by the publisher, Harvill Secker), and two of Simon Trewin’s authors also won prizes last night. Steven Hall picked up a Somerset Maugham prize from the Society of Authors for THE RAW SHARK TEXTS (one of the most breath-seizing and mind-bending debut novels I’ve ever read which I enjoyed selling into over 20 languages when I was maternity cover Rights Director at Canongate), and at a different awards ceremony, Fiona Neil won ‘Most Loveable Heroine’ for Lucy Sweeny in THE SECRET LIFE OF A SLUMMY MUMMY at the Melissa Nathan Award For Comedy Romance. UK paperback sales of SLUMMY MUMMY are close to totalling 300,000 copies, and Simon Trewin was just told by Arrow that it is the fastest selling paperback fiction debut in the UK for the past three years! Foreign rights have sold in 22 languages!
