A quick round-up of some of this year’s book prizes which are due to announce winners or have recently released shortlists.
The Aventis Prizes for Science Books 2005 has two shortlists - one for adults and one for children - both listing six books. The winner of each list will be announced Thursday 12 May. The general shortlist includes Richard Dawkins’ highly praised The Ancestor’s Tale (evolution looked at in reverse) and Robert Winston’s The Human Mind. Winston also features in the children’s shortlist with What Makes Me, Me?, one of a couple of Dorling Kindersley titles (what? only two DKs this year?), plus the rather topical Leap Through Time: Earthquake by Nicholas Harris.
The winner of The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2005 will be announced shortly. It covers the year’s best foreign fiction available in English translation. The shortlist includes Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World, an imagining of the unimaginable: what it was like to be in the eponymous restaurant at the top of the World Trade Centre north tower on the morning of 11 September 2001 (or “9/11″). Also Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, a mystical political and wide-ranging novel of ideas set in a snowbound Turkish town. The much-heralded (by Richard and Judy et al) The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón did not make it onto the shortlist.
The new Man Booker International Prize, awarded every two years to any author writing fiction in (or translated into) English announced its first longlist. Comprising 18 authors, it includes Philip Roth and John Updike (both American), Ian McEwan (UK), Milan Kundera (Czech, now living in Paris), Stanislaw Lem (Poland), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia) and Margaret Atwood (Canada). The winning author will be announced in June.
The Orange Prize for Fiction longlist was announced recently, comprising 20 books written by women. The longlist features authors such as Kate Atkinson, Anita Desai and Joyce Carol Oates - however many are relatively unknown (at least to me). The shortlist will be announced Monday 18 April and the winner on Tuesday 7 June.
The CILIP Carnegie Medal for children’s/young people’s fiction and The CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for children’s illustrator. These prizes are awarded by librarians who work closely with books and children. CILIP is the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. The Carnegie longlist includes Philippa Pearce (a local author who lives in Great Shelford - see our current display in the library) for The Little Gentleman and other well reviewed children’s books such as Philip Pullman’s The Scarecrow and his Servant, Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now and Michelle Paver’s Wolf Brother. The shortlists for both the CILIP Medals will be released end of April, and the winners announced early July.