Maverick House won an excellence award at the Asian Publishing Awards ceremony held in Bangkok on Friday 8 July in Bangkok.

A Secret History of The Bangkok Hilton by Chavoret Jaruboon with Pornchai Sereemongkonpol was among the top three books nominated for best non-fiction book on Asian Socio-Economic.

The Asian Publishing Awards (APA) is one of Asia’s premier awards program for the book, newspaper, newsletter and magazine publishing industry. More than 600 Asian publishers entered the competition.

Although Maverick House started operations in Dublin, it has been publishing to a number of Asian markets for several years and has an office and several staff based in Bangkok.

Colum McCann has won the 2011 IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize for his novel Let The Great World Spin. The award, the richest in the book world, carries a €100,000 prize for the winner.

McCann was born in Ireland but has lived in the United States since the mid-1990s. He defeated nine other authors including Colm Tóibín and William Trevor to gain the prize.

His book had previously won the National Book Award in the United States in 2009.

There’s an excellent feature piece with Eileen Battersby in today’s Irish Times:

Books were always at hand. His father, Seán McCann, was the features editor at the Irish Press . “He would give me a book and say ‘here, have a look at this’. I was always reading, everything, Kerouac. It was great. Then I decided I would write the great Irish novel but I couldn’t. I wasn’t messed-up enough. I was this middle class boy from the Clonkeen Road and had had a happy childhood.”

Image Credit:

Colum McCann. European Graduate School, www.egs.edu/, Photograph by Hendrik Speck,www.hendrikspeck.com/, Source: www.flickr.com/photos/hendrikspeck/

Four Irish writers have made this year’s Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award longlist. William Ryan, Alan Glynn, Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville are pitted against a formidable list of UK authors, including Val McDermid and Lee Child.

Now in its seventh year, the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, in partnership with Asda, and this year in association with the Daily Mirror, was created to celebrate the very best in crime writing and is open to British and Irish authors whose novels were published in paperback from 1st January 2010 to 31st May 2011.

The award is unique in that it is the only one of its kind which is largely voted for by the general public. As of today (Friday 13th May), the public will have until Sunday 5th June to vote for their favourite title at www.theakstons.co.uk and the result of this vote will determine the six titles that make it onto the shortlist.

The shortlist will be announced on 1st July, and the eventual winner will be decided by a panel of judges including this year’s Festival chair Dreda Say Mitchell, the journalist and novelist Henry Sutton, the winner of a Daily Mirror reader competition and Simon Theakston, Executive Director of T&R Theakston Ltd. winner of the prize will be announced by radio broadcaster and festival regular Mark Lawson on the opening night of the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate on Thursday 21st July. The winner will receive a £3,000 cash prize, as well as a handmade, engraved beer barrel provided by Theakstons Old Peculier.

The complete longlist is below:

Blacklands, by Belinda Bauer (Corgi)
From the Dead, by Mark Billingham (Sphere)
Blood Harvest, by S J Bolton (Corgi Books)
61 Hours, by Lee Child (Bantam Books)
Winterland, by Alan Glynn (Faber)
A Room Swept White, by Sophie Hannah (Hodder)
The Woodcutter, by Reginald Hill (Harper Fiction)
Rupture, by Simon Lelic (Picador)
Sister, by Rosamund Lupton (Piatkus)
Dark Blood, by Stuart MacBride (Harper Fiction)
Fever of the Bone, by Val McDermid (Sphere)
Fifty Grand, by Adrian McKinty (Serpent’s Tail)
Still Bleeding, Steve Mosby (Orion)
The Twelve, by Stuart Neville (Vintage)
Random, by Craig Robertson (Simon & Schuster)
The Holy Thief, by William Ryan (Pan Books)
The Anatomy of Ghosts, by Andrew Taylor (Michael Joseph)
A Capital Crime, by Laura Wilson, (Quercus)

Truly Tasty: Over 100 special recipes created by Ireland’s top chefs for adults living with kidney disease by Val Twomey and published by Cork University Press  under its Atrium imprint has been shortlisted by the Guild of Food Writers annual awards, one of the UK’s most prestigious awards in the field of food writing and broadcasting.

Truly Tasty has been shortlisted for the Miriam Polunin Award for Work on Healthy Eating with the BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme: Pop-up London presented by Sheila Dillon and Tim Hayward and BBC Two’s E Numbers: An Edible Adventure presented by Stefan Gates (produced by Plum Pictures) so it is up against stiff opposition.

The winner will be announced on June 2nd 2011.

The shortlist for the 21st Bisto Children’s Book of the Year Awards was revealed today. The winners will be announced at a ceremony held in The National Library of Ireland on Monday 16th May.

Each of the ten titles will compete for six awards which include, for the second year running, the ‘Children’s Choice Award’ voted for by ten junior juries located across the country.

Keith O’Sullivan, chair of the judging panel who this year read more than 70 titles said, ‘This year we have ten exceptional titles from a mix of established names and new talents. Irish authors and illustrators have shown exceptional skill in tackling both classic texts and contemporary themes. The shortlist offers something that all readers, young and old will enjoy.’

To mark the 21st anniversary of the Awards, Children’s Books Ireland who administer the Awards in partnership with sponsors Bisto, will be staging a travelling exhibition documenting the history of the Awards and the previous 20 winning titles, authors and illustrators. Members of the public are also being asked to vote for their favourite winning title in a national ‘Bisto Ballot’, the results of which will be announced in the autumn. The exhibition will be located at The National Library until Monday 16 May when it will then travel to a number of libraries across the country.

Nuala Naughton, Senior Brand Manager at Premier Foods Ireland, the owners of the Bisto brand which has sponsored the Awards since their inception in 1990 congratulated each of the shortlisted authors and illustrators. ‘We are delighted to continue the Bisto Children’s Book of the Year Awards and to support the promotion of excellence in children’s writing and illustration. Books provide us with an opportunity to learn, be entertained, discover new places and people and make for a great companion on long journeys. Children’s literature is hugely important as it plays a key role in developing not just language skills and critical thinking but also in nurturing real enjoyment in reading. We look forward to the announcement of the winners and hearing what the ten junior juries thought of the shortlisted titles.’

This year’s total prize fund is €19,000, with the overall winner of the Bisto Book of the Year Award receiving €10,000. The winner of the Eilís Dillon award, which is presented to a first time children’s author or illustrator, will receive €3,000 and the winner of the Children’s Choice Award €1,500. The remaining prize fund will be split equally between the three Bisto Honour Awards, one for writing, one for illustration and a Judges Special Recognition Award.

The shortlist is below:
A Bit Lost by Chris Haughton
Dancing in the Dark by Peter Prendergast
Mac Rí Éireann by Caitríona Hastings and Andrew Whitson
Prim Improper by Deirdre Sullivan
Taking Flight by Sheena Wilkinson
The Heart and The Bottle by Oliver Jeffers
The Lunatic’s Curse by F E Higgins
The Owl and The Pussycat illustrated by Kevin Waldron
Tiny Little Fly illustrated by Kevin Waldron
Up and Down by Oliver Jeffers

Irish Author Paul Murray has been shortlisted for the American National Book Critics Circle Fiction prize.

His book, Skippy Dies, which was also Booker longlisted in 2010 joins Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Franzen, David Grossman and Hans Keilson in the fiction category.

Skippy Dies was published by Faber & Faber in the US (but by Penguin imprint Hamish Hamilton in the UK and Ireland). The Booker Prize team conducted an excellent interview with Murray here.

The full list of nominees is below.

Fiction
Jennifer Egan, A Visit From The Goon Squad, Knopf

Jonathan Franzen. Freedom. Farrar, Straus And Giroux.

David Grossman, To The End Of The Land. Knopf.

Hans Keilson.Comedy In A Minor Key. Farrar, Straus And Giroux

Paul Murray. Skippy Dies. Faber & Faber.

Biography
Sarah Bakewell. How To Live, Or A Life Of Montaigne. Other Press

Selina Hastings. The Secret Lives Of Somerset Maugham: A Biography. Random House.

Yunte Huang. Charlie Chan: The Untold Story Of The Honorable Detective And His Rendezvous With American History. Norton.

Thomas Powers. The Killing Of Crazy Horse. Knopf.

Tom Segev. Simon Wiesenthal: The Lives And Legends. Doubleday

Autobiography
Kai Bird, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978, Scribner

David Dow, The Autobiography of an Execution, Twelve

Christopher Hitchens Hitch-22: A Memoir, Twelve

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Hiroshima in the Morning, Feminst Press

Patti Smith, Just Kids, Ecco

Darin Strauss, Half a Life, McSweeney’s

Criticism
Elif Batuman. The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings. Harper

Clare Cavanagh. Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West. Yale University Press.

Susie Linfield. The Cruel Radiance. University of Chicago Press.

Ander Monson. Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir. Graywolf

Nonfiction
Barbara Demick. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. Spiegel & Grau

S.C. Gwynne. Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American, Scribner

Jennifer Homans. Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet. Random

Siddhartha Mukherjee. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. Scribner

Isabel Wilkerson. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. Random

Poetry
Anne Carson. Nox. New Directions

Kathleen Graber. The Eternal City. Princeton University Press

Terrance Hayes. Lighthead. Penguin Poets

Kay Ryan. The Best of It. Grove

C.D. Wright. One with Others: [a little book of her days]. Copper Canyon

The Irish author was presented with the 18th annual Bad Sex award by Michael Winner, the film director, at a lavish ceremony in London last night.

He said: “What an honour to share a list with Jonathan Franzen and Christos Tsiolkas. There is nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of the entire nation I would like to thank you.”

via Bad Sex Award: Irish author Rowan Somerville beats Alastair Campbell – Telegraph.

Irish author Ruth Dudley-Edwards has won the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction for Aftermath: the Omagh Bombing & the Families’ Pursuit of Justice (Harvill Secker).

The judges praised “The historian and crime-novelist‘s detailed account of the successful struggle, with the assistance of lawyers, to achieve recognition of those responsible.”

The award took place at the Daggers Awards Ceremony at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate. As part of her prize, Dudley-Edwards received a cheque for £2000.

Five Americans and one British author have made the shortlist for the 2010 Frank O’Connor Short Story Award.

David Constantine is the only non-US writer to make the cut. He is joined on the list by Robin Black, Belle Boggs, TC Boyle, Ron Rash and Laura van den Berg.

The judges for the 2010 competition are Nadine O’Regan, Diana Reich and Mary Morrisy.

The competition, which is organised by the Munster Literature Centre and funded by Cork City Council, is in its sixth year and has a €35,000 prize fund and is the richest short story prize in the world.

The winner will be revealed in September at the Frank O’Connor short story festival in O’Connor’s home town of Cork.

The Full Shortlist
If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (Picador UK, 2010) by Robin Black
Mattaponi Queen (Graywolf Press, 2010) by Belle Boggs
Wild Child (Bloomsbury, 2010) by TC Boyle
The Shieling (Comma Press, 2009) by David Constantine
Burning Bright (HarperCollins, 2010) by Ron Rash
What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009) by Laura van den Berg