| London Book Award 2012 |
The London Awards for Art and Performance is the country's most expansive awards and recognises artists and performers across many art-forms. Each is presented to an individual or team who have made an outstanding contribution to their art form.
Who better than the nominees themselves to judge each category. We'll be asking nominees in each of the categories to pick their top artist/s and from that we'll arrive at the shortlist and award winner who will receive the trophy. The shortlist and winner will be announced at the Presentation Ceremony in June.
There will also be a public vote, where anyone can vote online. However, this will only be taken into account if there's a tie in the nominee votes.
Long list in competition (click on title for more) - nominations: 18
London Book Award Nomination A D Miller: '[on Snowdrops] This is a Russia gleaming with strip joints, call girls, malevolent overlords, fraudsters, overnight millionaires; but in which the old beg on snowy streets and tramps ring random doorbells seeking shelter from hypothermic death. The overriding theme is corruption and the way that morals can become corroded, but the novel is multi-layered; subtle rather than strident, and imbued with a bruised beauty.'
Chris Brocklebank · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Feb 17
London Book Award Nomination Carol Birch: '[on Jamrach’s Menagarie].. beyond the blood, brine and slime that swills down the Ratcliffe Highway, above the stench of the rotting fruit and vegetables and the excrement of a thousand animals, lies a rather subtler story of the hazy line between camaraderie and rivalry and of the bonds both forged and broken in extreme adversity.'
Chris Brocklebank · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Feb 17
London Book Award Nomination Tiffany Murray: '[on Diamond Star Halo] Raised in rural Monmouthshire, she grew up at the legendary Rockfield Studios, where her father was a producer and her mother the resident cook. In lesser hands, Murray's ensemble of eccentrics might have grown tiresome. It's testament to her talents that she has transformed this material into something more substantial. Thanks to Halo's presence, a tender coming-of-age story captures the ordinary pangs of growing up in unusual circumstances.'
Chris Brocklebank · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Feb 14
London Book Award Nomination Joanna Hodgkin: 'In this account of her mother Nancy's first marriage to novelist and travel writer Lawrence Durrell, Joanna Hodgkin is mindful enough of a history that places wives on the margins. This is not just a memoir of her mother. This is the history of a literary wife. On both counts, Hodgkin succeeds beautifully.'
Venetia Twigg · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Feb 11
London Book Award Nomination Jon McGregor: 'The prose is picked clean, pellucid. Even a young woman’s near-death experience, when a sugar beet smashes through her car windscreen, holds a purposeful, uncanny beauty entirely of that moment...'
Venetia Twigg · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Feb 02
London Book Award Nomination Geoff Dyer: 'It shilly-shallies aimlessly but also pricelessly. Therapy for Dyer, bliss for the reader.'
Venetia Twigg · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Jan 25
London Book Award Nomination Kate Williams: '[on The Pleasures of Men] .. an ambitious, challenging concern with form combined with a pitch-perfect historical ear. Williams has a gift for grotesque sensuality, impregnating her city with a fine layer of clinging filth... This intoxicating and disturbing novel is properly thrilling and extraordinarily well-written.'
Venetia Twigg · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Jan 18
London Book Award nomination Edward Hogan: '.. the financial stumbling blocks to love are particularly well handled . . . a gripping tale of trapped lives.'
Chris Brocklebank · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Nov 21
London Book Award nomination Gavin James Bower: '.. brave "warts and all" portrayal makes for an original and engaging novel.'
Chris Brocklebank · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Nov 16
London Book Award nomination Jackie Kay: "One of Kay's great skills as a writer is the way in which she explores the nebulous territory of the emotions."
Chris Brocklebank · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Nov 12
London Book Award nomination Zoe Strachan: 'This novel is a recurring homage to the power and curse of memory.'
Chris Brocklebank · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Nov 12
London Book Award nomination Lucy Caldwell: '.. a beautifully written and mature reflection on identity, loyalty and belief in a complex world.'
Chris Brocklebank · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Nov 12
London Book Award nomination Jeanette Winterson: “For a woman, and a working-class woman, to want to be a good writer, and to believe that you were good enough, that was not arrogance; that was politics.”
Chris Brocklebank · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Nov 02
London Book award nomination Pauline Black: 'Growing up, the usual horrors and confusions of being an adolescent had extra weight as she struggled to define herself in a largely white community and a family who thought it best not to acknowledge her colour.'
Chris Brocklebank · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Nov 02
London Book Award nomination Catherine Hall: '.. the strain of too-long-kept secrets and the damaging human foible of seeing yourself through the interpretations of others are all themes that Hall’s tautly-plotted novel touches upon.'
Chris Brocklebank · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Nov 01
London Book Award Nomination Aly Monroe's: '[on Icelight] Steeped in a palpably awful shabbiness, pickled in austerity and shrouded in slimy yellow fog, Monroe’s sense of post-war London is astonishingly good.'
Chris Brocklebank · Facebook · Twitter · Email · Oct 18
