CATCH BFLA AUTHORS AT THE EDINBURGH FESTIVALS

Edinburgh International Book Festival starts this week and you can see several Blake Friedmann authors there this August.

On Wednesday 16th Anneliese Mackintosh will be talking with Dana Spiotta. Their conversation will explore identity and transformation and the different ways their books address identity in their heroines on the panel Fast Friends. Mackintosh’s latest novel, SO HAPPY IT HURTS, was published on 27 July by Jonathan Cape. See more here.

Friday the 18th finds Pippa Goldschmidt author of THE NEED FOR BETTER REGULATION OF OUTER SPACE chairing the panel Rockets to Utopia? at 18:30, where she will be talking to Nalo Hopkinson, Ken MacLeod, Ada Palmer and Charles Stross about speculative fiction’s role in imagining hopeful futures. To find out more head to link here.

Christopher Nicholson is speaking to Jim Crumley about Men For All Seasons on 16th August. They will be exploring how Scotland’s wildlife copes with the chill, dark days, and exploring wildlife in the winter. Nicholson’s latest book AMONG THE SUMMER SNOW is an account of a summer's journey through the Highlands of Scotland in search of the snow patches that remain.  Find the event here.  

On Monday 21st Henrietta Rose-Innes talks on the panel of Dangerous Dispatches, as part of Amnesty International’s Imprisoned Writers series where they will discuss the dangers of being a journalist on the front line. The freedom of the press is continually under threat and reporting the news is one of the world’s most dangerous jobs. For tickets find the link here.

Henrietta Rose- Innes is also on the panel Near and Far, where she will be talking about her latest book Green Lion with author Cynan Jones. See her event at the Baillie Gifford Corner Theatre at 20:30.  

And finally, Alan Parks author of phenomenal debut BLOODY JANUARY will be appearing at the festival on Friday the 25th August where he will be talking with Malachy Tallack and Mick Kitson about their fiction. Get your tickets here.  

The Edinburgh Festival is one of the largest Arts events in the world and takes place for three weeks every August in Scotland’s capital city.

 

Annalise Mackintosh Website and Twitter

Pippa Goldschmidt Website and Twitter

Christopher Nicholson Website

Henrietta Rose-Innes Website and Twitter

Alan Parks Website

JANICE GALLOWAY AND PIPPA GOLDSCHMIDT LONGLISTED FOR THE EDGE HILL SHORT STORY PRIZE

JELLYFISH by Janice Galloway and THE NEED FOR BETTER REGULATION OF OUTER SPACE by Pippa Goldschmidt are among the short story collections longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. The list was announced yesterday and includes many Scottish and Irish authors and a number of prize-winning writers like Ali Smith, China Miéville, Kate Clanchy and Marina Warner .

The Edge Hill Prize is awarded annually by Edge Hill University for excellence in a published single-author short story collection. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Prize and Ailsa Cox, Professor of Short Fiction and organiser of the Short Story Prize shared her excitement for the event and for the strong longlist of established names competing alongside relative newcomers.

A shortlist of six authors will be announced in May, and the winner announced on 5th July. Judges are last year’s winner, Kirsty Gunn; Cathy Galvin, Director of The Word Factory; and Edge Hill Creative Writing Lecturer, Billy Cowan.

About JELLYFISH:

JELLYFISH is a collection of short stories, published in the UK by Freight Books. Three stories from the collection were broadcast by BBC Radio 4, and the book has already been longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize 2015.

Praise for JELLYFISH:

‘Foreboding floats through the fourteen tales … Reminiscent of Sylvia Plath in its black humour and visceral imagery … These deft short stories show why publishers should have more faith in the form … Exquisite similes and witty metaphors rise up and sting the senses like the eponymous jellyfish. With this electrifying volume Galloway proves herself a truly powerful writer who deserves to be much better known.’ – The Independent

‘An exquisite short-story collection … Previously very much a city writer, here the natural world encroaches on Galloway’s work from the title onwards, both indifferent and essential.’ – The Guardian

'This is a short story collection to savour, by one of the foremost Scottish writers of her generation.' – Irish Times

Visit Janice's website

About THE NEED FOR BETTER REGULATION OF OUTER SPACE:

In THE NEED FOR BETTER REGULATION OF OUTER SPACE, Pippa Goldschmidt brings together an outstanding collection of short stories on the theme of science and its impact on all our lives.

Praise for THE NEED FOR BETTER REGULATION OF OUTER SPACE:

'Definitions: 'scientist' – human being who wonders, tries, gets things wrong; 'science' – curiosity, wrapped in strange language and with odd-looking equipment; 'story' – what if, and then, and then. Pippa Goldschmidt mixes all of the above and the resulting compounds are sweet, funny, spicy, provocative, moving. Your universe will be expanded. It doesn't get any better than that.' – Tania Hershman, author of MY MOTHER WAS AN UPRIGHT PIANO 

'These stories, written with deep empathy and a bittersweet humour, open up a world where literature often fears to tread. Science is a tool for understanding the universe, but in Pippa Goldschmidt’s hands it is also a metaphor through which we can better understand ourselves. She is a writer of great heart and talent.' – Iain Maloney, author of FIRST TIME SOLO and SILMA HILL 

'Sharply imagined stories that glitter like a constellation: funny, sexy and moving by turns. There is a haunting, planetary loneliness at the heart of many of these tales, but they're told with energy, wit and unflagging inventiveness.' – Wayne Price, author of FURNACE and MERCY SEAT

'Pippa Goldschmidt is busy defining an entirely new kind of "science" fiction. These stories – all of which are superb exercises in tone and concision – are urgent dispatches from a territory almost completely ignored by contemporary authors – elegant fables that inhabit the intersection of science, culture, humanity, and which are thoroughly informed by a sharp understanding of both the secret histories and hidden processes of actual science.' – Alastair Reynolds, author or REVELATION SPACE and POSEIDON’S CHILDREN

Visit Pippa's website

Follow Pippa on Twitter: @goldipipschmidt

BFLA Authors in best of 2015 lists

It’s that time of year again when everyone's sharing their ‘Best of’ lists, and we’re extremely proud that our authors have been included in many of them. Below is a summary of the great places they were included and the great quotes that accompanied their pick.

RECIPES FOR LOVE AND MURDER - A TANNIE MARIA MYSTERY, HarperCollins US, draft.jpg

RECIPES FOR LOVE AND MURDER by Sally Andrew

Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2015:
"A delightful debut, tender and funny. The mystery takes on the worldwide problem of abused women while revealing both the beauties and problems of South Africa. And the recipes will make you want to drop everything and start cooking."

Wall Street Journal Best Mystery Book of 2015:
“The exotic locale, the lovely patois and the heroine’s unique sensibility make Ms. Andrew’s “Recipes” a blue-ribbon winner.”

Samantha Gibb, Sunday Times SA Best book of 2015:
“The quintessential feel-good SA whodunit, complete with recipes and advice. A must read.”

LUNGDON by Edward Carey

 

 

 

NPR Guide to 2015’s Great Reads:
“A magnificently engrossing indictment of our late capitalist modernity.”

 

 

 

 

THE FETCH by Finuala Dowling

Margaret von Klemperer, Fiona Snyckers & Helené Prinsloo, Sunday Times SA Best book of 2015:
‘A sparkling comedy of manners, but under the froth there are serious issues, and it is Dowling’s sensitive handling of them that makes this such a lovely book’ – Margaret von Klemperer

‘Comparisons with Jane Austen are not misplaced.’ – Fiona Snyckers

‘The characters from THE FETCH by Finuala Dowling haunted my dreams. The story led me to a garden cottage in the deep south where I kept waiting to happen upon someone like William.’ – Helené Prinsloo

 

THE DARKEST HOUR by Barbara Erskine

 

 

Books Covered, Favourite Book Covers of 2015:
‘Tender, romantic, and earnest, just like the brilliant story within. The gold foil adds a luxuriousness without being flashy and the whole designs speaks of the era so perfectly. This is a standout cover in this area of the market.’

 

 

 

JELLYFISH by Janice Galloway

Zoe Strachan, The Herald:
‘Janice Galloway prefaces her new collection of stories, JELLYFISH (Freight, £12.99), with a quote from David Lodge: “Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life’s the other way round.” In fact she gives us plenty of both, but it’s the stories about mothers and children that really cut to the quick.’

Sara Crowley and Kaite Welsh, Bristol Prize Best Short Story Reads of 2015:
‘My most eagerly awaited publication of 2015 was Janice Galloway’s JELLYFISH (Freight) which I am reading very slowly so as to savour each brilliant word.’ – Sara Crowley

‘Galloway has hit a rich seam of imagination as she returns to the short story as a form. It’s perfect for her style – wry, slightly off-kilter and always returning to the theme of parent and child, the kind of subject matter that offers Galloway the chance to delve once more into the murky depths of human relationships.’ – Kaite Welsh

Scots Whay Hae! Best Books of 2015:
‘Janice Galloway has always been an innovative and playful writer, but never to the detriment of her prose… JELLYFISH is a timely reminder that she is one of the finest writers around. Each story, each sentence, is beautifully crafted by someone who cares enough to take such care… If you read a better book than Jellyfish this year you are a very lucky person indeed.’

THE NEED FOR BETTER REGULATION OF OUTER SPACE by Pippa Goldschmidt

 

 

Alice Thompson, The Herald:
‘In these stories, the powerful juxtaposition of scientific intellect and emotional frailty is played out engagingly. The stories also imply no matter how objective scientific genius is, the scientists themselves, like the rest of us, are subject to moral failings.’

 

 

 

YOU ARE DEAD by Peter James

 

 

Guardian Best Crime and Thriller books of 2015:
‘Peter James showed that a diversion this year into ghost stories with THE HOUSE ON COLD HILL had not diverted energy from his consistently impressive sequence of DS Roy Grace policiers, the 11th of which, YOU ARE DEAD (Macmillan), confidently combines a cold case with a very hot one.’

 

 

 

THE LAST PILOT by Benjamin Johncock

Isabella Costello Literary Sofa ‘My Year in Books’:
‘Ben Johncock’s debut has all the things I love about American fiction and he’s not even American. Gorgeous spare prose, authentic sense of time and place, a poignant story told with sensitivity and restraint – I have raved about this book so much it’s embarrassing.’

Reading Groups’ Staff Picks for 2015:
‘With echoes of Tom Wolfe’s THE RIGHT STUFF and Richard Yates’ REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, THE LAST PILOT re-ignites the thrill and excitement of the space race through the story of one man’s courage in the face of unthinkable loss.’

Ian Rankin’s End of Year Roundup

Utter Biblio, Top 10 of 2015

ICARUS by Deon Meyer

 

 

Financial Times’ Crime Books of the Year

Boston Globe's Best Mystery Books of 2015:
‘An ashleymadison.com-style website-related murder and a parallel plot that delves into the dregs of South Africa’s wine industry keep Benny Griessel and his cadre of Cape Town coppers on their toes.’

 

 

 

GREEN LION by Henrietta Rose-Innes

 

Ben Williams, Fiona Snyckers & Jennifer Malec, Sunday Times SA Best book of 2015:
‘And if readers missed Henrietta Rose-Innes’s GREEN LION (Umuzi) … they’d best not let 2015 expire without acquainting themselves’ – Ben Williams

‘Rose-Innes goes from strength to strength, refining her craft with each new book.’ – Fiona Snyckers

‘Masterful’ – Jennifer Malec

 

 

THE FOLLY by Ivan Vladislavic

 

 

Flavorwire’s 15 Worthwhile Books You Might Have Missed in 2015:
‘Praised by the likes of Coetzee and others — it’s not hard to see why…’

 

 

 

101 DETECTIVES by Ivan Vladislavic

Michelle Magwood, Jennifer Malec & Sophie Kohler Sunday Times SA Best book of 2015:
‘Mordantly funny, acutely perceptive and exquisitely styled, this collection of short stories is a definitive showcase of Vladislavic’s talents.’ – Michelle Magwood

‘Witty, enthralling and pleasurably disorientating.’ – Jennifer Malec

‘The stories are bewildering in their refusal to provide a clear resolution, but this is to their credit, in that each leaves a mystery to be solved.’ – Sophie Kohler

 

 

THE A WONG COOKBOOK by Andrew Wong

 Rose Prince, Spectator Best New Cookery Books 2015:
‘There is food in A Wong: The Cookbook (Mitchell Beazley, £25) for home cooks, but it is also a chef’s book. May every aspiring one buy it. If they did, Chinese food in Britain would go through a true revolution.’

Observer 25 best food books 2015:
‘At his Pimlico restaurant, Wong is keen to prove that Chinese food can be just as considered as other, more revered cuisines.’


Blake Friedmann authors at the Wigtown Book Festival

The Wigtown Book Festival begins on 23rd September and it’s the perfect chance to catch four Blake Friedmann authors discussing their work. The festival takes place over ten days and welcomes over 100 writers to Wigtown, this year including Frank Gardner, Val McDermid and Phill Jupitus.

Pippa Goldschmidt will be taking part in two different events at the festival. On Sunday 27th September she will be running a creative writing workshop with a difference at her Dark Skies experience, free for under 25s. She will also be talking with Marek Kukula about I AM BECAUSE YOU ARE, an anthology she recently co-edited, and the legacy of Einstein’s achievement.

On Monday 28th September Helen Walmsley-Johnson will be talking about her manifesto for middle-age, THE INVISIBLE WOMAN. Tickets are available here.

On Sunday 4th October, Gregory Norminton will be talking about French classic THE LITTLE PRINCE by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry as part of the Children’s Festival. Buy tickets here.

Janice Galloway will also be talking about her short story collection JELLYFISH, published by Freight Books, at the McNeillie tent – you can buy tickets here.

For more information about Wigtown Book Festival, you can visit their website.

Pippa Goldschmidt’s THE NEED FOR BETTER REGULATION OF OUTER SPACE published today

Pippa Goldschmidt’s THE NEED FOR BETTER REGULATION OF OUTER SPACE is published today by Freight books. The collection is longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize 2015. The official launch event for the book will be at Looking Glass Books in Edinburgh on the 11th June – you can click here for more information, or to reserve your ticket.

In THE NEED FOR BETTER REGULATION OF OUTER SPACE, Pippa Goldschmidt brings together an outstanding collection of short stories on the theme of science and its impact on all our lives. By turns witty, accessible, fascinating and deeply moving, Goldschmidt demonstrates her mastery of the short form as well as her ability to draw out scientific themes with humane and compelling insight. Goldschmidt allows us to spy on Bertolt Brecht, as he rewrites his play Life of Galileo with Charles Laughton after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She introduces us to Albert Einstein as he deals with the loss of his first child, Liesel. We meet Robert Oppenheimer scheming against his tutor, Professor Patrick Blackett, at Cambridge University, having fallen in love with Blackett’s wife. She tells the story of a female university student starting a love affair with her lecturer paralleled alongside the ‘relationship’ between Alice and Bob, two imaginary figures that symbolise the theory of relativity. Goldschmidt’s scope can be epic, at other times intimate, providing a forensic examination of relationships and the forces that influence them.

Pippa was recently featured on BBC Open Book talking about Solar Eclipses in literature, the week of the solar eclipse. Her story from the collection, ‘No Numbers’, was broadcast as part of the BBC Radio 4 Scottish Shorts series. She also spoke with Elaine Chiew on BBC Radio Scotland about the COOKED UP anthology that her work is featured in.

You can catch Pippa reading some of her poems about astronomy and Chile at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, London on the 6th of June. She’ll also be appearing at the Glasgow Science Festival on 10th June, and German readers can catch her in Bremen and Berlin on 18th and 19th June respectively.

Pippa Goldschmidt lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. She used to be an astrophysicist and her first novel THE FALLING SKY, about an astronomer who discovers evidence contradicting the Big Bang theory, was a runner-up in the Dundee International book Prize for 2012, and longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize 2014 and is published by Freight Books (2013) and in Germany by Weidle. She is currently a writer in residence at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg institute near Bremen, Germany. She was writer in residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum, at the University of Edinburgh. She has a Masters in creative writing from the University of Glasgow and was a winner of a Scottish Book Trust/Creative Scotland New Writers Award for 2011/12. Her short stories, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in a wide variety of publications including the New York Times, and one of her essays has appeared in an anthology of the Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014, published by Houghton Mifflin.

Praise for THE NEED FOR BETTER REGULATION OF OUTER SPACE:

'Definitions: 'scientist' – human being who wonders, tries, gets things wrong; 'science' – curiosity, wrapped in strange language and with odd-looking equipment; 'story' – what if, and then, and then. Pippa Goldschmidt mixes all of the above and the resulting compounds are sweet, funny, spicy, provocative, moving. Your universe will be expanded. It doesn't get any better than that.' – Tania Hershman, author of MY MOTHER WAS AN UPRIGHT PIANO 

'These stories, written with deep empathy and a bittersweet humour, open up a world where literature often fears to tread. Science is a tool for understanding the universe, but in Pippa Goldschmidt’s hands it is also a metaphor through which we can better understand ourselves. She is a writer of great heart and talent.' – Iain Maloney, author of FIRST TIME SOLO and SILMA HILL 

'Sharply imagined stories that glitter like a constellation: funny, sexy and moving by turns. There is a haunting, planetary loneliness at the heart of many of these tales, but they're told with energy, wit and unflagging inventiveness.' – Wayne Price, author of FURNACE and MERCY SEAT

'Pippa Goldschmidt is busy defining an entirely new kind of "science" fiction. These stories – all of which are superb exercises in tone and concision – are urgent dispatches from a territory almost completely ignored by contemporary authors – elegant fables that inhabit the intersection of science, culture, humanity, and which are thoroughly informed by a sharp understanding of both the secret histories and hidden processes of actual science.' – Alastair Reynolds, author or REVELATION SPACE and POSEIDON’S CHILDREN

Praise for THE FALLING SKY:

'A delicate and fascinating study of a life in which intellect and external microscopic and cosmic fields interact.’ – Stephen Fry, Judge of the Dundee International Book Prize 2012

‘This novel is brilliant on several levels. Beautifully written, with many flashes of dark humour, it is fascinating... and is also a terrific portrayal of one woman’s struggle with past tragedy and present difficulties.’ – Daily Mail