Ten of the best railway journeys

Ten of the best railway journeys

"Midnight on the Great Western", by Thomas Hardy Hardy's poem is a vignette of Victorian public transport, preserved forever. By "the roof-lamp's oily flame" a boy is seen half asleep in his third-class seat, his ticket stuck in his hat band, "Bewrapt past knowing to what he was going, / Or whence he came".

Possession, by AS Byatt There comes a crucial moment in Byatt's tale of two modern-day academics who have discovered the love letters of two famous Victorian poets, when the story suddenly shifts to the 19th century. "The man and the woman sat opposite each other in the railway carriage." The train is the transport of illicit love.

Strangers on a Train, by Patricia Highsmith Who would an unhappy husband with an unfaithful wife meet on a train? In a Patricia Highsmith novel, a helpful psychopath, naturally. Cuckold Guy gets talking to loopy Bruno and is offered a deal: I'll kill your wife, if you murder my dad; with no connection between us, the police will never track us down.

Stamboul Train, by Graham Greene On a train from Ostend to Istanbul, assorted characters from Greeneland – an exiled politician, a beautiful woman, a journalist, a fleeing criminal – are thrown together with amorous and violent consequences. There are plot complications in Vienna and desperate dangers at a stop in Serbia, where Greene's protagonist, the businessman Myatt, finds himself plunged into murderous political rivalries.

Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie Rather more luxurious than Greene's Stamboul train, Christie's express takes its characters down the same tracks to a dénouement that must be reached before the Bosphorus. A murder is committed, and Poirot is on board.

Breakheart Pass, by Alistair Maclean Maclean liked to seal off a group of characters in perilous circumstances and reveal their hidden allegiances. Breakheart Pass takes place on a train travelling through a Nevada winter in the 1870s, with a murderer being escorted to a remote garrison, where disaster has apparently struck. There's a politician, a doctor, a pretty girl . . . who is the baddie?

Emil and the Detectives, by Erich Kästner Young Emil has been sent by his poor widowed mother on a train from his provincial home to Berlin, with money for his grandmother pinned inside his jacket. In the train he is befriended by Herr Grundeis, who eventually drugs him and steals the money. But in Berlin, the indefatigable Emil and some local boys get on Grundeis's trail . . .

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, by JK Rowling You meet your best friends on trains. From Platform 9¾ at King's Cross, the school train flies off to Hogsmeade. Our young wizard makes many such journeys, but none so memorable as the first, on which he meets his boon companions, Ron and Hermione.

"Night Mail", by WH Auden Auden's invocation of the mail train travelling from London to Glasgow was written to fit the famous GPO documentary film. Sometimes close to doggerel on the page, it comes to life in performance, gathering speed as the train descends from the moorlands towards the Clyde. "Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes, / Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces / Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen".

"The Whitsun Weddings", by Philip Larkin Larkin's poem follows his own common journey from Hull to London, the train dawdling across flatlands, "All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense / Of being in a hurry gone". The journey presents fleeting snapshots of other lives, and a vision of all those weddings culminating on provincial platforms.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Ned Kelly Award (1996-2010)

From Ned Kelly Awards accessed 9/8/10

The Ned Kelly Award winners for 2010 were announced on Friday, September 3 at the Melbourne Writers Festival Club, ACMI.

The 2010 winners are:
Best First Fiction: Mark Dapin, King of the Cross, Macmillan
Best True Crime: Kathy Marks, Pitcairn: Paradise Lost, Harper Collins
Best Fiction: Garry Disher, Wyatt Text
SD Harvey Short Story: Zane Lovitt, Leaving the Fountainhead
Lifetime Achievement: Peter Doyle

2009:
Best First Fiction: Nick Gadd, Ghostlines
Best True Crime: Chloe Hooper, The Tall Man
Best Fiction (Tie): Peter Corris, Deep Water Kel Robertson, Smoke & Mirrors
Lifetime Achievement Awards: Shane Maloney

2008:
Best First Fiction: Chris Womersley, The Low Road, (Scribe)
Best True Crime: Evan McHugh, Red Centre, Dead Heart
Best Fiction: Michael Robotham, Shatter (Hachette Livre)
Lifetime Achievement Awards: Marele Day

2007:
Best First Fiction: Adrian Hyland, Diamond Dove (Text)
Best True Crime (Tie): Liz Porter, Written On The Skin (Macmillan) and
Debi Marshall, Killing For Pleasure: The Definitive Story of the Snowtown Murders (Random House)
Best Fiction: Gary Disher, Chain of Evidence (Text)
Lifetime Achievement Awards: Sandra Harvey and Lindsay Simpson

2006:
Best First Novel: Wendy James, Out of the Silence Random House
Best True Crime: Lachlan McCulloch, Packing Death Sly Ink
Best Fiction (Tie): Chris Nyst, Crook as Rookwood Harper Collins and Peter Temple, The Broken Shore Text
Lifetime Achievement Awards: Andrew Rule and John Silvester

2005
Best First Fiction: Malcolm Knox, A Private Man
Best Novel Michael Rowbotham, Lost
Best True Crime (Tie): Helen Garner, Jo Cinque’s Consolation and Tony Reeves, Mr Big
Lifetime Achievement Award: Stuart Coupe

2004
Best First Fiction (Tie): Jane R Goodall, The Walker and Wayne Grogan, Junkie Pilgrim
Best Fiction: Jon Cleary, Degrees of Connection
Best True Crime: Peter Rees, Killing Juanita
Lifetime Achievement Award: Investigative journalist, Bob Bottom

2003
Best First Fiction: Alex Palmer, Blood Redemption
Best Fiction: Peter Temple, White Dog
Best True Crime Peter Lalor, Blood Stain
Lifetime Achievement Award: Kerry Greenwood

2002
Best First Fiction (Tie): Bunty Avieson, Apartment 255 and Emma Darcy, Who Killed Angelique?
Best Fiction: Gabrielle Lord, Death Delights
Best True Crime (Tie): Larry Writer, Razor and Mike Richards, The Hanged Man
Best Teenage/Young Adult: Ken Catran, Blue Murder
Readers Vote: Bunty Avieson, Apartment 255
Lifetime Achievement Award: Patrick Gallagher, Managing Director, Allan & Unwin

2001
Best First Fiction: Andrew McGahan, Last Drinks
Best Fiction (Tie): Peter Temple, Dead Point and Andrew Masterson, The Second Coming
Best True Crime: Estelle Blackburn, Broken Lives
Readers Vote: Lindy Cameron, Bleeding Hearts
Lifetime Achievement Award: Stephen Knight

2000
Best First Fiction: Marshall Browne, The Wooden Leg of Inspector Anders
Best Fiction: Peter Temple, Shooting Star
Best True Crime (Tie): John Dale, Huckstepp: A Dangerous Life and Andrew Rule and John Silvester, Underbelly 3

1999
Best First Fiction: Andrew Masterson, The Last Days
Best Fiction: Peter Doyle, Amaze Your Friends
Lifetime Achievement Award: Peter Corris

1997
Best First Fiction (Tie): Peter Temple, Bad Debts and Peter Doyle, Get Rich Quick
Best Fiction: Shane Maloney, Brush Off
Best Non-Fiction How to write crime edited by Marele Day Lifetime Contribution Awarded to Alan Yates (aka Carter Brown)

1996
Best First Fiction: John Dale, Dark Angel
Best Novel (Tie): Barry Maitland, The Malcontenta and Paul Thomas, Inside Dope
Lifetime Achievement Award: Jon Cleary

Sisters in Crime Davitt Award (2001-2010)

2010 info from Sister in Crime accessed 9/6/10
2001-09 info from Wikipedia accessed 9/6/10
The Davitt Awards (named in honour of Ellen Davitt (1812-1879) who wrote Australia's first mystery novel, Force and Fraud in 1865) are presented by the Sisters in Crime Australia association. The awards are presented for Australian crime fiction, by women, for both adults and young adults. They were established in 2001.

2010
Best Adult Novel - Sharp Shooter by Marianne Delacourt
Best YA - Liar by Justine Larbalestier
True Crime - Lady Killer: How Conman Bruce Burrell kidnapped and killed rich women for their money by Candace Sutton and Ellen Eonnolly
Readers' Choice - Forbidden Fruit by Kerry Greenwood

2009
Best Adult Novel - A Beautiful Place To Die by Malla Nunn
Best YA Novel - Genius Squad by Catherine Jinks
True Crime - The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island by Chloe Hooper
Readers' Choice - The Darkest Hour by Katherine Howell

2008
Best Adult Novel - Frantic by Katherine Howell
Best YA Novel - The Night Has a Thousand Eyes by Mandy Sayer
True Crime - Killing Jodie by Janet Fife-Yeomans
Readers' Choice - Scarlet Stiletto - The First Cut by Lindy Cameron

2007
Best Adult Novel - Undertow by Sydney Bauer
Best YA Novel - The Betrayal of Bindy Mackenzie by Jaclyn Moriarty
True Crime - Silent Death: The Killing of Julie Ramage by Karen Kissane
Readers' Choice - (tie) Devil's Food by Kerry Greenwood
Silent Death: The Killing of Julie Ramage by Karen Kissane

2006
Best Adult Novel - The Butterfly Man by Heather Rose
Best YA Novel - Evil Genius by Catherine Jinks
Readers' Choice - (tie) Heavenly Pleasures by Kerry Greenwood
Rubdown by Leigh Redhead

2005
Best Adult Novel - Malicious Intent by Kathryn Fox
Best YA Novel - Devastation Road by Joanna Baker
Readers' Choice - Peepshow by Leigh Redhead

2004
Best Adult Novel - Due Preparations for the Plague by Janette Turner Hospital
Best YA Novel - Muck-Up Day by Ruth Starke
Readers' Choice - Thicker Than Water by Lindy Cameron

2003
Best Adult Novel - (tie) Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing by Gabrielle Lord
Blood Redemption by Alex Palmer
Best YA Novel - Fireworks and Darkness by Natalie Jane Prior
Readers' Choice - Skin Deep by Cathy Cole

2002
Best Adult Novel - A Simple Death by Carolyn Morwood
Best YA Novel - Three-Pronged Dagger by Kerry Greenwood
Readers' Choice - Bleeding Hearts by Lindy Cameron

2001
Best YA Novel - Eye to Eye by Caroline Shaw

Hugo Awards (2009-10)

2010 Hugo Awards and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
Nominees for the 2010 Hugo Awards and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer have been named. Winners will be announced at a ceremony September 5 in Melbourne, Australia, during Aussiecon 4, the 68th World Science Fiction Convention.

Finalists for best novel are Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
The City and The City by China Miéville - Winner! (tie)
Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America by Robert Charles Wilson
Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente
Wake by Robert J. Sawyer 
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi - Winner! (tie)

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer nominees are
Saladin Ahmed
Gail Carriger
Felix Gilman
Seanan McGuire -  Winner!  Rosemary and Rue, (October Daye #1) 
Lezli Robyn

2009 Hugo Awards and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
Finalists for best novel include

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman -- Winner

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Saturn's Children by Charles Stross
Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer nominees are
Aliette de Bodard (not on GR)
David Anthony Durham -- The War With the Mein (Book One of the Acacia Trilogy) -- Winner
Felix Gilman -- Thunderer
Tony Pi (not on GR)
Gord Sellar (not on GR)

NAIBA Books of the Year prize (2009)

The winners of this year's (2010) NAIBA Books of the Year, sponsored by the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association:

Fiction: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (Random House)
Nonfiction: Just Kids by Patti Smith (Ecco)
Picture Book: Jeremy Draws a Monster by Peter McCarty (Holt)
Children's Literature and YA: Flawed Dogs by Berkley Breathed (Philomel)
Trade Paperback Original: Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos and Annie DiDonna (Bloomsbury)

NAIBA has also created a new award, the NAIBA Carla Cohen Free Speech Award, whose first recipients are Pam Munoz Ryan and Peter Sis for The Dreamer (Scholastic). The award includes a donation to ABFFE in the authors' name.

The winners will receive their awards at the NAIBA Fall Conference Awards Banquet, Tuesday, September 21.

2009 Winners:
Fiction: A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick (Algonquin)
Nonfiction: Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg (Other Press)
Trade Paperback Original: Buffalo Lockjaw by Greg Ames (Hyperion)
Picture Book: The Curious Garden by Peter Brown (Little Brown Books for Young Readers)
Children's Literature: If I Stay by Gayle Forman (Dutton)

Biographers' Club Prize (2010)

From Bio Newsletter accessed 9/3/10 and Biographers' Club Web Site.


The [London] Biographers' Club is renaming its annual prize the Tony Lothian Biographers' Club Prize after the late biographer. The £2,000 prize is awarded each year by the London-based organization to an uncommissioned first-time writer working on a biography.

The name change was prompted by a generous donation from the Lothian family. Antonella, Marchioness of Lothian, OBE (1922-2007)--always known as Tony--wrote a biography of her close friend Valentina Tereshkova (Valentina: The First Woman in Space). Lothian was also a current-affairs columnist on the Scottish Daily Express and a broadcaster and television presenter. In 1955, along with Odette Hallowes and Georgina Coleridge, she created the Woman of the Year Lunch, an event that continues to this day.

This year's judges will be Margaret Drabble, whose biographies include Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson; Anne de Courcy, author of The Viceroy's Daughters and Snowdon: The Biography; and John Guy, whose books include Tudor England and My Heart Is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots.
The 2007 prize winner, Clare Mulley's The Woman Who Saved the Children: A Biography of Eglantyne Jebb, was released by Oneworld on April 24. All the book's royalties will be donated to the Save the Children Fund.

Previous winners of the Biographers’ Club Prize (now the Tony Lothian Biographers’ Club Prize) include:

Lucy Jago – The Northern Lights (Hamish Hamilton)
Adrian Fort – Prof: The Life and Times of Frederick Lindemann (Cape)
Adrienne Gavin – Dark Horse: A Life of Anna Sewell (The History Press)
Helen Smith – Midwife of Genius: Edward Garnett (forthcoming Cape)
Clare Mullley – The Woman Who Saved the Children: Eglantyne Jebb (Oneworld)
Anna Swan - whose Statues without Shadows (Sceptre) was shortlisted for the J.R. Ackerley Prize.

Several short-listed writers also went on to be published, including
Jessie Childs for Henry VIII’s Last Victim, won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography;
John Higgs’ I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary (Barricade Books);
Matthew Dennison’s The Last Princess (Orion);
Pauline Halford’s Storm Warning (Sutton);
Philip Eade’s Sylvia: Queen of the Headhunters (Orion).

2010
Biographies on the short list for the Best First Biography:
What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir of Blindness, by Candia McWilliam (Jonathan Cape)
Lesley Blanch: Inner Landscapes, Wilder Shores, by Anne Boston (John Murray)
Storyteller: The Authorised Biography of Roald Dahl, by Donald Sturrock (HarperPress)
E. M. Forster: A New Life, by Wendy Moffat (Bloomsbury)
Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives, by Daisy Hay (Bloomsbury)
The Alan Clarke Diaries: The Biography, by Ion Trewin (Wiedenfeld & Nicholson)

Dayton Literary Peace Prize (2006-2009)

from Dayton Literary Peace Prize, accessed 08/28/09.

The Dayton Literary Peace Prize honors writers whose work uses the power of literature to foster peace, social justice, and global understanding. Launched in 2006, it has already established itself as one of the world’s most prestigious literary honors, and is the only literary peace prize awarded in the United States. As an offshoot of the Dayton Peace Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize awards a $10,000 cash prize each year to one fiction and one nonfiction author whose work addresses themes of peace as a solution to conflict, and leads readers to a better understanding of other cultures, peoples, religions, and political points of view. An annual lifetime achievement award is also bestowed upon a writer whose body of work reflects the Prize's mission; previous honorees included Taylor Branch, Studs Terkel and Elie Wiesel.

2010 Finalists:
Fiction
A Postcard from the Volcano by Lucy Beckett
A Good Fall by Ha Jin
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
The Book of Night Women by Marlon James
The Calligrapher's Daughter by Eugenia Kim
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Adiche

Nonfiction
Enough: Why the Worlds Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman
In the Valley of the Mist by Justine Hardy
Stones into Schools by Greg Mortenson
Tears in the Darkness by Michael and Elizabeth Norman
The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

Winners will be honored at a ceremony in Dayton, Ohio, on November 7.

The 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize fiction finalists are:

Runner-up! * Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan
WINNER! * Peace by Richard Bausch
* The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
* Beijing Coma by Ma Jian (
* Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner
* Song Yet Sung by James McBride

The 2009 nonfiction finalists are:
* Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization by Nicholson Baker 
* Dust from our Eyes: An Unblinkered Look at Africa by Joan Baxter
Runner-up! * Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman (
* Writing in the Dark by David Grossman
* My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for his Father’s Past by Ariel Sabar
WINNER! * A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face with Modern Day Slavery by Benjamin Skinner
* The Great Experiment by Strobe Talbott

2008
Lifetime Achievement Award Taylor Branch
Fiction Award Junot Díaz for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Nonfiction Award Edwidge Danticat for Brother, I’m Dying
Fiction Runner-up Daniel Alarcón for Lost City Radio
Nonfiction Runner-up Cullen Murphy for Are We Rome?

2007
Lifetime Achievement Award Elie Weisel
Fiction Award Brad Kessler for Birds in Fall
Nonfiction Award Mark Kurlansky for Nonviolence: Twenty-five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea
Fiction Runner-up Lisa Fugard for Skinner’s Drift
Nonfiction Runner-up David Relin and Greg Mortenson for Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time

2006
Lifetime Achievement Award Studs Terkel
Fiction Award Francine Prose for A Changed Man
Nonfiction Award Stephen Walker for Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima
Fiction Runner-up Kevin Haworth for The Discontinuity of Small Things
Nonfiction Runner-up Adam Hochschild for Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves