It’s the East Midlands Book Award tonight and I’m really excited because it’s a great opportunity for local authors to get wider recognition for their work. We covered the award with a review of all eight books in LeftLion 41 and have followed up with seven out of eight interviews online. But who is going to win?

Well this is an opportunity for me to score my first ever literary hat trick as I previously predicted that 8/1 outsider Howard Jakobson would scoop last year’s Booker Prize and that twenty-five year old Téa Obreht would take the Orange Prize for fiction with The Tiger’s Wife. For the East Midlands Book Award I’m plumping for Judith Allnatt’s The Poet’s Wife, which is why the interview hasn’t been done yet.

I think this could win for three reasons. Firstly, it was born out of an arts project that saw Judith researching local literary figures. If ever there was validation of the importance of such projects in these tough economic times, it is this. Without the project, Judith wouldn’t have spent all of those hours scrolling through the microfiche, marvelling at John Clare’s elegant and curlicued handwriting. Secondly, Allnatt is based in Northamptonshire which has been under represented in the East Midlands and so it offers some well deserved, and needed, publicity. Finally, it is a work of fiction about a poet and so is the perfect marriage between art forms. Poetry is grossly under represented on a national level and this book offers a bridge of sorts to readdress this balance. The fact that poet Ian McMillan is involved also tends to suggests that something poetry orientated may win.

But whether the judging panel will take such factors into consideration is another matter entirely as it should be judged by the content on the page. So what about the others? Let’s start with the poets first. Rosie Garner has already been recognised by McMillan, having worked on the Three Cities Project and I believe winning the competition with her poem about the ‘River.’ She’s thought of very highly locally and certainly the ‘people’s poet,’ particularly after Poetry on the Buses – Portrait of a City. If she were to win I would expect to hear a big cheer. Mark Goodwin on the other hand is a more radical poet, a real eccentric, whose collection Shod deals with a ‘shoe messiah’ and is a modern parable of the religious story. Goodwin would be my second favourite to snatch the award and has already had another collection, Back of a Vast, nominated. Which, incidentally, he prefers to Shod. Now doesn’t that tell you something about competitions…

There are two crime based novels up for the award which I would see as outside bets. Anne Zouroudi has a worldwide following due to the success of her Greek Detective series featuring the lovable Hermes Diaktoros whereas Adrian Magson’s Death on the Marais takes a similarly continental tone, being set in 1960s France. If the judges are after something more philosophical then they may plump for Stephen Baker’s Hemispheres, which is essentially the retelling of the Odyssey but set in Stockton. Although tough to read in places, it raises awareness of PTSD which could be a winning factor. For sheer beauty there is Maria Allen’s Before the Earthquake which out of all of the nominations was the one I couldn’t put down. Having featured as a Book at Bedtime and already a close runner up in the Desmond Elliot Prize, she has to be a firm favourite. Last but not least is Ann Featherstone’s The Newgate Jig, her second foray into the dark underbelly of Victorian London. Ann is slowly becoming the definitive voice of this period, trawling through the archives to create her very own version of Balzac’s comédie humaine. The language and characters are perfect and completely transport you into the period.

Although only one person will scoop the award, the coverage should help to promote their public profile and raise awareness of literature in the region. Thank you Writing East Midlands.  

The winner of the East Midlands Book Award will be announced at the Lowdham Book Festival on 20 June. For more information on other events, please see the Lowdham website.

Ps: I was wrong…it went to Mark Goodwin

The Leaf Writers’ magazine was first published in spring 2010 and comes out three times a year in both print (£6) and online as a downloadable pdf (£3). It’s a practical guide to writing, offering advice on all areas of creative writing with the intention of bridging the gap between professional writers and amateurs. They run various themed competitions for poets and writers alike, with publication for the winners. Although some may be sceptical of publications that charge entry fees for competitions, it does offer a realistic opportunity for new writers to make that all important first step into print. It’s also a pragmatic way for magazines to supplement income brought in through advertising.

Each issue has a general theme. Issue three was ‘Travel’ and I wrote a literary guide to the then World Book Capital of the World, Ljubljana, and James Joyce’s Trieste. I also did a feature/interview with Sir Andrew Motion, discussing his planned follow up to Treasure Island and how the internet is enabling poetry to reach a wider and more varied audience.

The theme for issue four is ‘creative collaboration.’ For this I reviewed Howl, Penguin’s debut foray into the world of graphical poetry. For the purists out there this is further evidence of the dumbing down process, the reader is no longer required to conjure images up for themselves. Or could it be that it’s simply a new means of keeping poetry alive and appealing to a wider audience. The original is still available after all. These were issues we debated in the WriteLion 6 podcast with students from ncn who were illustrating the poetry of James Joyce in a project with Candlestick Press and the Nottingham Writers’ Studio.     

Ethical considerations aside, I wasn’t a big fan. Not for the issues raised in the high/low culture debate above, but because I didn’t like the illustrations. There’s no doubting Eric Drooker’s proven ability and Allen Ginsberg completely endorsed his work, but they looked like something out of a Pixar movie which detracted from the darkness of the poem: smooth edges don’t work with the raw and uncooked.

My interview/feature was with Staple editor Wayne Burrows who has collaborated across art forms to help him think in character for the purposes of developing his novel Albany 6. Albany 6 is about a musician who invents a playback system that affects memory and is ‘a little bit like the history of music since the 1960s, crossed with a bit of Phillip K Dick.’ One of his characters, Robert Holcombe, started out as an afterthought, whose only purpose within the narrative was to give insight into the main protagonist’s ideas. However, Holcombe has become a  bit of an obsession for Wayne and developed a life of his own. This saw Wayne give a 30 minute spoof lecture at Hatch on the life of his fictional character, including over 70 collages of artwork supposedly made by the artist. More recently Holcombe is celebrated in a short film for Annexinema, rather fittingly about a man obsessed with finding patterns in random images. But what I love most about this project, other than it being a practical means of recycling work, is the way Holcombe is slowly willing himself alive. He’ll be poking you on Facebook next…