Ismail Kadaré wins International Booker

Ismail Kadaré is today has been named as the winner of the first ever Man Booker International Prize.

Kadaré, born in 1936 in the Albanian mountain town of Gjirokaster near the Greek border, is Albania's best-known poet and novelist. He has lived in France since 1990, following his decision to seek asylum stating that: "Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship." Harvey McGrath, Chairman of Man Group plc, said:

"Ismail Kadaré's novels shine a light on the mores of his native Albania. His writing reflects not only the complexities of a nation coming to terms with its freedom, but also his own personal experiences, and make him a worthy recipient of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize."

Ismail Kadaré will receive the prize of £60,000 and a trophy at the Award Ceremony on 27 June 2005 in Edinburgh.

In accordance with the rules of the recently announced separate prize for translation, Kadaré will choose a translator or translators to receive an additional prize of £15,000.

Comedy - Sitcom Writers At War

I like to think of writing as a noble, elegant and largely solitary pursuit. When a writer does go to meet other humans they may also be writers and, unencumbered by professional jealousy, they have the satisfied understanding that they are in accord and privileged to share conversation with another writer (as opposed to a Labour Party press officer, a convicted baby smuggler or Princess Michael of Kent).

Unfortunately, writing is now about going out into the world with a stack of paper under your arm marked "writing"; finding someone else with a similar stack of paper; and then kicking each other violently in the shins. The one who drops their stack of paper first is clearly not as good a writer as he thought he was.

I'm talking about a tendency to make writers battle it out head-to-head (or head-to-head-to-head-to-head... as the case may be).

I was reminded of this by a press release from the USA about Bravo TV's Situation:Comedy.

Bravo's new series will allow viewers to go behind the scenes of national television as neophyte writers will earn the opportunity to produce and sell a sitcom - but the eavesdropping audience will give the final thumbs-up by choosing the winning entry that will be broadcast on Bravo.

[...] the lucky five writers were flown to Los Angeles, where they were thrown into the deep end of the creative pitching pool. They then submitted their ideas to NBC network executives who green-lighted two of the scripts to go into production as 15-minute presentations [...]

The final two "wannabe" writers (or writing teams) were thrust immediately into the high-energy, high-stress world of television production. Viewers will be with them as they meet their staffs and find that they have to share many of their key staffers.

In addition, audiences will watch the entire process through casting, set design, rewrites, rehearsals, taping and post-production. In the end, they will see each completed presentation and can vote online for the sitcom they believe should get a shot for broadcast on television. The winner will receive a cash prize of $25,000 and exclusive representation for one year with a major Hollywood talent agency to further help launch a successful writing career in film or television.

I think it's time I took up knitting.

This form is already with us in Britain where the BBC's Last Laugh competition will involve the winners in television appearances. In fifty years we've managed to conjure up Hancock, Steptoe & Son, Fawlty Towers and the mighty Cilla's World of Comedy without reducing writers to dancing media monkey-boys.

The next writer to join the ranks of Galton & Simpson could be someone you first saw completing an obstacle course to win a treacle tart or soaping their genitals in a glass walled latrine.

LBC book club

A new book club run by London radio station LBC has been criticised for selecting titles on the basis of payments made by publishers, reports Jack Malvern in The Times.

Books that appear on the Book of the Month feature on Daisy Sampson’s drive-time show on LBC are selected not by a panel of experts, but by the books’ publishers, who pay £10,000 to get a book on air. Despite criticism from authors, who believe that readers will be misled by the book club, LBC said that it had no intention of informing its listeners of the five-figure fees.

Mostra, the marketing agency which set up the club, said that although it would allow a range of views to be broadcast on each book, LBC would not broadcast any review featuring severe criticism.

Antony Beevor, the author of Stalingrad and chairman of the Society of Authors, described the LBC book club as a “deeply cynical” exercise. “It puts complaints about bungs given to booksellers to get them to put books in their windows completely in the shade,” he said. “Obviously it is just a way of buying publicity. If you are buying an advertisement it should be made clear that it is an advertisement.”

Book Slam

When Ben Watt, one half of the dance duo Everything But The Girl, told the author Patrick Neate that he wanted to put on a bookish event at his west-London bar Cherry Jam, Neate wasn't very encouraging. "I told him it was a stupid idea," he says. Two years later, Book Slam - a monthly night hosted by Neate - has become the brightest example of a new trend in live author events. The scene has its origins in the slam poetry scene and the concept is simple: authors known and unknown read extracts from their work and DJs and bands play in between.

Literary festivals and author readings have always been a staple of British literary culture, but Book Slam is different. It's just like a night down the pub, only with story-telling thrown in. "I wanted to put on a night that I actually wanted to go to," said Neate. "I could be really highfalutin' about it, but Book Slam is just an excuse to listen to good music and literature and not worry that I'm 34."

The full story from Claire Allfree is in The Independent.

Power-cut at the Guild

The Writers' Guild offices have suffered a complete power-cut. Please be patient if you are trying to contact the office. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Guild chair backs BBC unions

Graham Lester George, Chair of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain, has added his support for the action that broadcasting unions are taking against cuts planned by the BBC. Speaking at the Euro-MEI General Assembly in Budapest, where an emergency resolution supporting the unions was backed, Graham said that "We [the Guild] believe in the BBC and in its virtues".

Comedy - Hay, Hay, Hay... wassup!?

Don't panic, I won't speak in that kind of urban lingo any longer. It's unbecoming in one, such as I, bespectacled and pasty faced. I can't stand it any more than you can.

I'm Graeme and Tom Green has allowed me to be the blog's comedy writing correspondent. I'll try and ensure that no opportunities for comedy writers slip through this particular cybernet. I'll also point you at articles, news and interviews relating to comedy.

First up then, the previously mentioned literary behemoth that is The Hay Festival has a nifty online programme and allows you to view all the events that are humorous in nature. (Don't let the fact that what then appears is headed by Max Boyce fool you, it really is a listing of comedy).

You can create similarly tunnel visioned listings for other, far less important, categories such as philosophy and history by palpating the little widgets on the right of the page.

Haype This Haylps.

Update: On closer inspection I now notice that the only event left under the comedy category that you can see without the aid of a TARDIS is Ned Sherrin. Note to self: "Future posts to be more useful".

In a desperate bid to recover face, here's a snippet from the BBC Comedy Blog about comedians at Hay:

Later, Braben regaled the audience with gag-filled reminiscences of working with Eric Morecambe, Ernie Wise and Ken Dodd. (Sometimes even topical: he said Tony Blair's back problems were down to "the way he's been lying")

Braben churned out one-liners for Dodd's relentless six-gags-a-minute act for 12 years. Counting the jokes that never made it, it's been estimated that he wrote more than half a million jokes for Dodd alone. "You have to write 300 gags to get 60 - you always have to overwrite," he said.

Writing half a million jokes for Ken Dodd. Imagine. Like some kind of Gag-Gulag (shudder).

Midsomer Murders an international hit

Midsomer Murders, based on the books by Caroline Graham, is the UK's second most successful TV export, reports BBC News.

The ITV drama sells to 201 countries, second only to Gillette World Sport which sells to 240.

The full survey of UK TV exports for 2004 is available from Pact.

TV show ignores writers

Further to the post below, this account of the more common experience of script-writers being totally ignored is sent to me by Julius Hogben

In the first of his new BBC TV series last night, Cambridge University don Nigel Spivey set out his subject, “telling stories in pictures”. Beginning “in the dawn of time”, as TV presenters so often do, he declared that “ the same technique has proved crucial to the success of every film made today.”

He then managed to tell the story of Ulysses and the Cyclops by statues, with his own narration, without featuring the key role of Homer. Later, he hauled on George Miller director and co-writer of Mad Max to say “One cannot underestimate the effect of special effects and music in modern film storytelling.” Fair enough. You suspect that Miller’s co-writer on Mad Max must have been quite significant, not to mention his two other co-writers on Mad Max 2.

Tune in next week for more on How Art Made the World Without Writers?

TV critic credits writers

It's not often that a soap or series writer gets a name check in a TV review. So for two to be mentioned in one piece (Media Guardian, free registration required) must be something of a record. The luck couple are Colin Wyatt (EastEnders) and Nick Fisher (New Tricks).

Regular readers will remember that the reviewer, Rupert Smith, recently accepted a challenge from Mal Young and wrote an episode of Doctors. Maybe all reviewers should be given the same opportunity.

Children's book prizes

How richly should we reward high achievement in children's writing? Even Philip Pullman, that matchless inventor of parallel worlds, might think twice about devising an imaginary kingdom that endowed an annual prize for young people's literature worth a cool £385,000 - from the public coffers - to the winner. The lucky author collects this fairy-tale crock of gold from a genuine princess and caps a week of official festivities with a lecture in the nation's parliament.

As it happens, Pullman has merely shared this year's Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, founded and funded by the Swedish state in tribute to the creator of Pippi Longstocking and the values that her books uphold. The enormous cheque, and the dazzling limelight of this week's jamboree in Stockholm, has been split between the fabricator of His Dark Materials and the Japanese illustrator Ryôji Arai. All the same, Sweden's generosity has a truly folkloric aspect, down to Wednesday's meeting with the Crown Princess - who arrived, one trusts, in a glass coach drawn by white mice - and the mythically round sum (five million crowns) of the award itself.

More on children's books prizes from Boyd Tonkin in The Independent.

Making Hay

If you can't get to the Hay Festival, you can follow it all week on The Guardian's Hay Festival blog.

More genteel than most is that of Alexander McCall Smith, a man whose professorial demeanour frequently collapses into mildly hysterical laughter over a deeply funny hour that ranges from German academic nomenclature to a one-legged sausage dog.

He is, he explains, suffering from a condition that he caught from Armistead Maupin at a San Francisco party. "This is a medical issue – serial novelism. There is no cure – you write serial novels and then you die."

Who's blogging

In recent weeks we have started to open this blog up to a greater range of authors.

Dutch screenwriter Thessa Mooij is sending occasional reports from America, where she lives, and Edel Brosnan will be submitting posts next week from the Listowel Writers' Week.

We're planning daily posts from the Edinburgh Festival this summer and are always on the lookout for other ways to increase our range of coverage. If any Guild members are interested in contributing, drop me a line c/o of the Guild office.

Wilson is the new Children's Laureate

Despite fears among her supporters that literary snobbery would stand in her way, Jacqueline Wilson has ... been named as the new children's laureate, arguably the most popular - and populist - author to hold the position to date.

Following in the footsteps of Quentin Blake, Anne Fine and Michael Morpurgo, the author of Tracy Beaker, Double Act, Bad Girls, The Illustrated Mum and numerous other acclaimed novels for children will receive a bursary of £10,000 and will hold the post for two years.

More about Jacqueline Wilson in The Guardian.

Double re-commission for New Tricks

The BBC has given TV drama New Tricks and double re-commission.

Filming will begin on the eight-part third series later this year. The fourth series of a further eight one-hour episodes is due to be shot in 2006.

It's the first time that more than one series of a drama has been re-commissioned at the same time, but it could be the sign of things to come.

Jane Tranter, Controller, Drama Commissioning, BBC says: "Double commissioning is designed to allow independent production companies the creative freedom to think further forward with their development of long running drama for the BBC.

"This is a clear commitment from us to continuing to secure the very best drama for our audience, and another way of making BBC commissioning more nimble."

New Tricks is made for the BBC by Wall to Wall television. It was created by Roy Mitchell and Nigel McCrery, and writers on the current series are Roy Mitchell, Nick Fisher, Karen Maclachlan, Howard Overman and Danny Miller.

New plays for The Globe?

Dominic Dromgoole, who will replace Mark Rylance as artistic director of The Globe theatre in London at the end of this year, has told The Stage that he wants to find a place for contemporary work alongside the Shakespeare.

"I think the Globe is a very magical place, a very special place. It’s already achieved so much. I would like to see some contemporary playwrights trying to fill that space but Shakespeare will remain as the core. If the modern plays are out there, I would like to take that risk for next season.”

Listowel Writers' Week; 1st-5th June

Annual Irish literary fest Listowel Writers' Week begins next Wednesday, in Listowel, Co. Kerry. Featured events include workshops on everything from crime writing to song writing; lunchtime and evening theatre; book launches and of course readings and/or Q & A sessions with writers - Robert Fisk, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Jack Mapanje, Carol Ann Duffy, Joe Simpson, Lawrence Block, Booker prize-winner D B C Pierre and many many more.

Irish writers at Listowel include Booker nominees Colm Toibín and Roddy Doyle, as well as Ronan Bennett, Michael Longley Pauline McLynn and Ross O'Carroll Kelly.

As a local girl and Guild member, I'll do my best to blog the highlights.

The axing of Westway

Westway, the World Service radio soap will be axed this summer as part of the BBC's latest round of cuts. Madness, says Dominic Dromgoole in Media Guardian (free registration required).

Surely we give money to the BBC so it doesn't have to enter the same frantic and sweaty games as everybody else, and so it can balloon off in new and interesting directions. The purpose of the BBC, I always assumed, was to nurture the wildest plants in our society and to tidy, with a gentle but sure hand, the most hidden corners in our room. Both functions were served by Westway. Why is it letting it go?

johnaugust.com

If you want to get inside the mind of one of Hollywood's top screenwriters,try johnaugust.com.

John, who wrote Go and Swingers and has adapted Big Fish and Charlie And the Chocolate Factory, offers advice to aspiring writers and comments on past, present and future projects.

Black theatre in the West End

Should you venture into the West End at night this week, you'll find not one but two pieces of black British theatre.

Elmina's Kitchen by Kwame Kwei-Armah, originally commissioned by the National and now starring the playwright himself, is the first new black British play to open in the commercial sector. And The Big Life, a riotous ska musical developed at Theatre Royal, Stratford East, is the first black British musical to open in this famous postcode.

More in The Independent.