Sixteen Books Shortlisted for Scotland’s Biggest Literary Prize
Sixteen Scottish authors are in the running to receive £30,000 and Scotland’s Book of the Year accolade as part of the Scottish Arts Council’s Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust 2010 Book Awards.
Exploring themes of love, vanity, loyalty, hope and despair, the Scottish authors have been recognized for their literary excellence by judges Pat Kane, Kirsty Gunn, Catherine Lockerbie and Dr Gavin Wallace, across four categories; fiction, non-fiction, poetry and first book.
Four category winners will be chosen in April, one of whom will go on to win Scotland’s largest literary prize, the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust/Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year, which will be announced as part of the Borders Books Festival on 18 June 2010, in Melrose.
The books capture the width and breadth of Scotland’s literary talent both residing in and outwith Scotland as they exploring beauty, nature, disaster, religion, history, politics, both in Scotland and far beyond.
The shortlisted books are:
Fiction
John Aberdein, Strip the Willow (Polygon)
Alan Bissett, Death of a Ladies’ Man (Hachette Scotland)
A L Kennedy, What Becomes (Jonathan Cape)
Liam McIlvanney, All the Colours of the Town (Faber)
Non-Fiction
Robert Crawford, The Bard: Robert Burns, a biography (Pimlico)
William Dalrymple, Nine Lives: In Search of the Modern India (Bloomsbury)
Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (Oxford university Press)
Poetry
John Burnside, The Hunt in the Forest (Jonathan Cape)
Thomas A Clark, The Hundred Thousand Places (Carcanet Press)
Don Paterson, Rain (Faber)
Tom Leonard, Outside the Narrative (Word Power/Etruscan Books)
Richard Price, Rays (Carcanet Press)
First Book
Nick Currie (Momus), Solution 11-167: The Book of Scotlands (Sternberg Press)
Sarah Gabriel, Eating Pomegranates (Jonathan Cape)
JO Morgan, Natural Mechanical (CB Editions)
Andrew Philip, The Ambulance Box (Salt Publishing)
| For more information about the awards visit www.scottisharts.org.uk/bookawards | |