PART-TIME BOOK DEPARTMENT ASSISTANT AT BLAKE FRIEDMANN

Blake Friedmann is looking for an energetic, creative and highly motivated Book Department Assistant to work on a 6-month (potentially renewable) contract, for three days a week, beginning from the week of 16 October 2017. This role will support the overall running of the Book Department, in addition to some reception duties and administrative tasks for the Finance, Contracts and Foreign Rights Departments.

The ideal candidate will be highly organised, have an ability to pick up new systems quickly, and will feel confident handling a varied, high-volume workload, including contractual processing and data entering. They will also have a passion for books, excellent communication skills, an understanding of digital and social media, and a sharp eye for detail. Familiarity with the Bradbury Phillips system would be an advantage.

This role offers an ideal opportunity to an individual with administrative skills and some initial publishing or internship experience to discover more about publishing, receive further training and develop their knowledge and contacts within the industry, while working with some flexibility in a friendly, creative environment.

To apply: please send your cover letter and CV to Melis Dagoglu at melis@blakefriedmann.co.uk.

Closing date for applications: Monday 11 September 2017.

Christopher Nicholson Shortlisted for Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature

Christopher Nicholson’s AMONG THE SUMMER SNOWS (September Publishing, 2017) has been Shortlisted for the 2017 Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature.

The Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature was established to promote literature by providing an annual award to authors of literary works, the central theme of which is concerned with the mountain environment. The prize of £3,000 commemorates the lives of Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker and is given to the author or co-authors of an original work, which has made an outstanding contribution to mountain literature.

The winner will be announced on November 17th at the Kendal Mountain Festival. Other books on the shortlist include Tommy Caldwell’s THE PUSH and Ed Douglas’ THE MAGICIAN’S GLASS.

As the summer draws to a close, a few snowbeds - some as big as icebergs - survive in the Scottish Highlands. Christopher Nicholson's AMONG THE SUMMER SNOWS is both a celebration of these great, icy relics and an intensely personal meditation on their significance. A book to delight all those interested in mountains and snow, full of vivid description and anecdote, it explores the meanings of nature, beauty and mortality in the twenty-first century.

Christopher Nichsolson is the author of three novels, including THE ELEPHANT KEEPER (Fourth Estate, 2009), shortlisted for the Costa Prize in 2009, and the Encore Award in 2011, and dramatized for BBC Radio 4. His most recent novel, WINTER, about the later life of Thomas Hardy, was published in 2014 by Fourth Estate and also adapted for BBC Radio as TESS IN WINTER.

Praise for AMONG THE SUMMER SNOWS:

‘A beautiful book about love and loss, fragility and chance, the wide world and the near world . . . full of intense light and colour, extraordinary glimpses, moving insights and subtle humour.' – Richard Kerridge, author of COLD BLOOD

'This ravishingly lovely book is about thought-snow, summer snow, flight, falling, stillness, memory, loss, mountains, Time, death, survival and everything in between. It is an intense scrutiny of minute worlds, a roaming gaze into the vastness of space, intimate, introspective and questioning.' – Keggie Carew, author of DADLAND

‘It’s a long while since I read a book that made me laugh and cry within just a few pages … A wrong-footing marvel of a book … touching both death’s void, and love, and the beauty of the natural world at one and the same time and in a way that is all the more powerful for its restraint.’ – Books from Scotland

Praise for WINTER:

'Fine, vivid moments... a strong addition to [Nicholson's] ‎... distinguished oeuvre.' – Thomas Mallon, The New York Times Book Review

'Understated, tender... an entrancing piece of fiction.' – The New Yorker 

'A wonderful novel, moving, gripping and illuminating. Keeping closely to the known facts about the triangular relationship between the elderly Thomas Hardy, his second wife Florence, and the beautiful young butcher's wife and amateur actress, Gertrude, Nicholson has used the resources of fiction to represent their emotional lives with intensity and depth.' – David Lodge 

‘A superb novel... Beautifully written, very moving.’ – John Boyne, author of THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS

Sarah Lotz’ novel THE THREE to be adapted for the BBC

The BBC has announced that Sarah Lotz’s novel THE THREE will be adapted into a major eight-part drama for BBC. See http://www.tvwise.co.uk/2017/08/bbc-one-orders-sarah-lotz-adaptation-three-charles-sobhraj-drama-series-serpent/

BAFTA and Golden Globe award winner and Academy nominee, Peter Straughan will be the lead adapter and show-runner, and Sarah will also be involved as scriptwriter and executive producer. Kate Sinclair and George Faber will exec produce for The Forge.

Sinclair said: "When I first read Sarah Lotz’s stunning proposal for THE THREE four years ago, I knew in my gut she was brilliant, that it was so unique that I had to have it, and that I needed to get someone as truly extraordinary as the exceptional Peter Straughan to adapt it."

THE THREE opens as four planes crash on the same day in four different countries, and three children miraculously survive. Elspeth Martin, a no-nonsense crash investigator with the NTSB is sent from Washington to find out the causes, but her dogged determination to get at the truth is obstructed by conflicting evidence, media scrutiny and conspiracy theories. Her investigations take her to the townships of South Africa, the Florida swamps, the depths of the Atlantic and the notorious Aokigahara 'suicide' forest in Japan – an epic journey that forces her re-evaluate everything she believes in.

THE THREE was published in 2014 and is the first in a planned trilogy of novels. The second in the series, DAY FOUR, was published in 2015.

GREEN LION BY HENRIETTA ROSE-INNES OUT IN THE UK TODAY And catch her at Edinburgh International Book Festival!

GREEN LION by Henrietta Rose-Innes is published in the UK today by Aardvark Bureau, who published her prize-winning NINEVEH last year. This masterful novel, published in South Africa by Umuzi and in France by Editions Zoe, has already drawn much praise and received a 5-star review from Lara Feigel in the Telegraph this weekend. Patrick Flanery described it as ‘poignant and unsentimental, an urgent story of quiet, lurking terror’, while Ivan Vladislavić says that ‘in GREEN LION Henrietta Rose-Innes has written another extraordinary novel, lyrical, deftly plotted, and as full of life as the Ark.’

When a lion at a breeding park mauls an old school friend, Con steps in as the keeper of Sekhmet, the last remaining Cape black-maned lioness in the world. As he grows steadily more bonded to his enigmatic charge, a cult of animal lovers with obscure alchemical aims seeks to claim the lioness as their own. When she escapes, Sekhmet engulfs the city’s imagination, stirring up rumours of terror and magic and in Con’s quest to track her down, he must enter the wilderness of a cordoned-off Table Mountain – and his own dark history.

On today’s publication day readers can also catch Henrietta at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. She will be talking about GREEN LION at 20:30 with author Cynan Jones at the Baillie Gifford Corner Theatre and will also take part in Amnesty International’s Imprisoned Writers series from 17:30-18:15, where readings will highlight the dangers of being a journalist on the front line. For tickets find the link here. At 18:30 on Tuesday 22 August Henrietta will be speaking at Golden Hare Books in Edinburgh. For more information see here.  For London readers Belgravia Books will launch GREEN LION on 5 September.

More praise for GREEN LION:
'Beautifully written, with prose that is mixed with poetry and power GREEN LION has sent me off looking for more work by Henrietta Rose-Innes.' – Paul McVeigh

'What’s being explored, and it’s a theme that feels oddly neglected in contemporary fiction, is the relationship between humans and animals and with nature more generally…[Henrietta uses these lions as] a lens in which to examine her country’s history as a troubled moment… In Rose Innes’s hands, the beast becomes less a political symbol than a personal one… This is a novel that is unafraid of symbolism but manages not to seem heavy handed… If there is an inner Lion in us all, as Rose Innes seems to suggest, her prose weaving between muscular and lyrical, is well equipped to capture what this might feel like… The question for [Rose-Innes’] characters is how to live without repressing its roar or succumbing to it fully.’ — Lara Feigel, The Telegraph, 5 star review

‘So many moments of glorious observations and beautifully rendered prose …GREEN LION is one of my favourite books of the year so far, and a journey I will certainly be taking again. On top of that, Henrietta Rose-Innes is a glorious writer who manages to write about mankind and the natural world, without taking sides.’ — Paul Dawson

‘Rose-Inne s reveals an unflinching embrace of the messiness of human and animal life, and their troubled interactions … the depth of Rose-Innes' characterisation makes GREEN LION a satisfying read.’ – The Book Bag

‘In GREEN LION Henrietta Rose-Innes has written another extraordinary novel, lyrical, deftly plotted, and as full of life as the Ark. In the Cape Town of her imagination, a place both utterly strange and eerily familiar, wildness is always pressing up against the fence. The ‘animal’, she suggests, is not just out there but in here, shaping what we do and say, embedded in language itself like a stubborn gene.’ – Ivan Vladislavić

Praise for Henrietta Rose-Innes
'Rose-Innes is a writer almost in the Virginia Woolf mould – lateral of mind and poetic in her style of narration.' – Leon de Kock, Sunday Time

‘Henrietta Rose-Innes is a master of the beautifully thought-out metaphor. Her prose is elegant and liquid.’ – Cape Times

 About Henrietta Rose-Innes
Henrietta is the author of four novels and one book of short stories. She was winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing 2008 (for which she was shortlisted in 2007), the PEN Short Story Prize 2007, and awarded the Runner-Up prize for her short story 'Sanctuary' at the BBC International Short Story Awards 2012. Her novel, NINEVEH, was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Fiction Prize (South Africa), the M-Net Prize 2012 and won the Francois Sommer Literary Prize.

Find out more about Henrietta Rose-Innes on her  website.

Follow her on Twitter.

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