Congratulations to Laura Beatty for winning The Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2009! Laura’s debut novel, POLLARD (published last summer by Chatto in hardcover and the Vintage paperback will be published this summer) has been chosen out of very strong shortlist: God’s Own Country by Ross Raisin (Viking); Girl Made of Dust by Nathalie Abi-Ezzi (Fourth Estate); The Behaviour of Moths by Poppy Adams (Virago); Broken by Daniel Clay (HarperPress); Pynter Bender by Jacob Ross (Fourth Estate); and Road From Damascus by Robin Yassin-Kassab (Hamish Hamilton). Olivia Laing who picked POLLARD in The Observer as a Best Book of 2008, had written in her review: “Like Nicola Barker, who she occasionally recalls, Beatty is drawn to the margins of society and to the misfits who congregate there…Pollard is the precise opposite of escapist literature, because it gives the reader back the world. This is just the sort of generous, provocative novel the Booker judges should cherish.“ Laura’s primary agent, Caroline Dawnay, and I are delighted the Authors’ Club judges (led by Booker-shortlisted author Philip Hensher) cherished POLLARD. All foreign rights are available.
Meanwhile I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Samantha Harvey’s stunning debut novel, THE WILDERNESS, which is long-listed for The Orange Prize, will make it onto the shortlist. The announcement will come in the midst of The London Book Fair on April 21st. Samantha Harvey was already featured in the January 2009 issue of Harper’s Bazaar as a “Star of 2009″ and you can read the fantastic US and UK reviews of THE WILDERNESS in my previous blog posting, and also on Samantha Harvey’s website. Foreign rights are sold to DVA/Germany, Ambo Anthos/The Netherlands, Editons du Panama/France, and Keter/Israel, and today we accepted a Portuguese offer from Bertrand/Portugal.
