Hamish Hamilton News
RSS feedHamish Hamilton Goes Back to its Roots 19 November 2008
Founded as we were by a Scotsman, it was lovely to see two Hamish Hamilton authors on the shortlist for the Saltire Society’s Scottish Book of the Year Award 2008, announced today: James Kelman for his superb Kieron Smith, boy and Ali Smith for her wonderful Canongate Myth Girl Meets Boy. Congratulations to both of them and we look forward to the announcement of the winner on the 28th November.
In a possible first, the shortlist for the Society’s Scottish First Book of the Year also includes a critical study of James Kelman, by Simon Kovesi.
The Interrogation 19 November 2008
Forty-five years to the day after the photograph below of Le Clézio receiving his first award for his debut The Interrogation, advance copies of our facsimile paperback reprint have arrived in the office. Republished to celebrate Le Clézio’s award of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, it will be in the shops by the end of the month.
The Birth of Cool 14 November 2008
J.M.G. Le Clezio and wife collecting a prize for his first novel, The Interrogation on 19 November, 1963, also a special date for Hamish Hamilton publisher Simon Prosser.
John Updike Interview 14 November 2008
From 1995:
Part two is right here.
Looking Forward 14 November 2008
The Port Eliot Festival returns after a year off in July next year and we are thrilled to unveil the poster for it, drawn by the great Ralph Steadman.
Hamish Hamilton and Port Eliot share a director (Simon Prosser is Co-Director of the festival, with Catherine St Germans, and Publishing Director of HH) and cross over in all sorts of other ways. Do take a look at the new festival website — tickets will be available in December.
Maximum Clarity 13 November 2008
Congratulations to Nathan Burton – our former, now honorary, HH art director (he’s gone freelance) – whose cover for Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole won the Best Jacket/Cover Design Award at last night’s British Book Design and Production Awards 2008.
The judges said: “A worthy winner – clever design, well executed, that carries round on to the spine for maximum clarity on the shelf.”
As over 100,000 new books are published each year in the UK we are thrilled for Nathan.
Viva Obama! 7 November 2008
Here at Hamish Hamilton we’re absolutely overjoyed about Barack Obama’s victory on Tuesday and our thoughts are with Team Obama as they prepare to get stuck into what can only be described as a very, very important job.
On Monday in Five Dials, we had paid our own advance tribute to the US elections with a selection of authors looking back on the election as though it had already happened, and to our delight, the Guardian featured this in G2 as a wonderful five-page spread.
None of the scenarios imagined actually came true, but the real-life result was enough to keep us smiling for a while, so we’re not complaining.
Mohsin Hamid shortlisted for the Australia-Asia Literary Award 3 November 2008
The shortlist for the richest literary award in Australia and Asia has just been released and we are thrilled that Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is on it.
The 12 novels longlisted for the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award, from an original field of 111 entries has now been narrowed down to five:
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
Blood Kin by Ceridwen Dovey
Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital
The Complete Stories by David Malouf
The $110,000 prize makes the award the richest in the region. Where the winning entry has been translated into English, the author will receive $88,000 and the translator $22,000.
Steve Toltz shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 3 November 2008
It was great to see Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole on the shortlist for the Guardian First Book Award last week. We are all hoping that he might follow Hamish Hamilton writers Zadie Smith and Jonathan Safran Foer in winning the prize, which is announced in early December.
The Guardian news story describes it as “a cantering, carnivalesque Australian saga” with “a strongly individual, distinctive narrative voice: a rumbustious, funny page-turner that tells the story of Jasper, now behind bars, his father, Martin, and his uncle, the criminal mastermind Terry.”
The £10,000 prize – which covers fiction, non-fiction and poetry published in the UK – is unique not only in its recognition of debut authors, but also through the extent to which it involves readers’ groups in the judging process.
The panel that will select the winner includes novelist Roddy Doyle, broadcaster and novelist Francine Stock, poet Daljit Nagra, historian David Kynaston, novelist Kate Mosse and Guardian deputy editor Katharine Viner. Readers’ groups’ views will be represented by Waterstone’s Stuart Broom, who said: “What was especially noticeable this year was how much readers demand: they wanted big books, big themes and ambitious prose that soared.”
Fingers crossed!
Le Clézio Wins the Nobel 30 October 2008
Many congratulations to J.M.G. Le Clézio, whose first four novels were published by Hamish Hamilton in the 1960s, who has been named by the Swedish Academy as the winner of its 2008 award in Literature. The academy praised Le Clézio, 68, as “an author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.” He has published more than 30 novels, essays, story collections and translations. We are preparing a new edition of his classic first novel The Interrogation, acclaimed as the most stunning French debut since the death of Camus, for publication at the end of next month, just ahead of Le Clézio’s Nobel acceptance speech.
“We live in a troubled era in which we are bombarded by a chaos of ideas and images,” Le Clézio said at a press conference announcing the award. “The role of literature today is perhaps to echo this chaos.”