What does 2013 hold for the literary world?
I missed 2012 from a literary perspective but I hope not to make the same mistake for 2013. Here are some of the highlights for the forthcoming year...
January
200 years have passed since the publication of Pride and Prejudice and bosoms are still heaving after Mr Darcy even if they are a little freer than in 1813! Events are bound to be plentiful to celebrate the anniversary.
The finalists for the fifth Man Booker International prize will be announced at the Jaipur festival.
February
Release of Pow! by Mo Yan (Seagull Books). The first new novel in English from the Chinese author awarded the 2012 Nobel literature prize for his "hallucinatory realism" is a riotous carnival of food, sex and death in rural China.
Release of Gone to the Forest by Katie Kitamura (Clerkenwell Press). A white family implodes in an unnamed colonial country on the brink of civil war. I am reading lots of post-colonial theory at the moment and this seems apt.
March
The 7th is World Book Day. A Unesco-designated celebration of books marked in more than 100 countries. In the UK more than 14m book tokens will be distributed to children under 18. This can only be encouraged - more children need to discover the joy of reading.
April
The 23rd of April is Shakespeare's birth and death day and is an appropriate date for World Book Night. The books are:
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman
Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
The White Queen by Philippa Gregory
A Little History of the World by E.H Gombrich
Little Face by Sophie Hannah
Damage by Josephine Hart
The Island by Victoria Hislop
Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay
Last Night Another Soldier... by Andy McNab
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
The Reader by Bernard Schlink
No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Road Home by Rose Tremain
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson
Judge Dredd: The Dark Judges by John Wagner
Release of The Roundhouse by Louise Erdrich (Corsair). This novel about a young teenager investigating his mother's assault beat Dave Eggers and Junot Diaz to the US National Book award last year, and has been called a Native American To Kill a Mockingbird.
Release of Crossing the Bosporus by Deborah Cater. A non-fiction account of three western women with different outlooks on life travelling from Bulgaria to Istanbul.
May
Book related (I sincerely hope it does follow the book's plot) is the cinematic release of The Great Gatsby. I love the book I hope Luhrmann has done it justice.
June
Presentation of first Women's Prize for Fiction, successor to the Orange prize; the 2013 panel is chaired by Miranda Richardson.
July
Time to buy a selection of the year's earlier releases and hit the beach - not much happening in the world of books this month.
August
At least in August you can head up to Edinburgh for its International Book Festival.
September
Lots of small book festivals are scheduled in September - choose from:
Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival
The First Transylvanian Book Festival
Bleinhem Palace Literary Festival
October
Henley Literary Festival - technically it starts on the last day of September but as most of it sits in october, well here it is.
New Bridget Jones by Helen Fielding (Jonathan Cape). Seventeen years after her diaries of a singleton's comic mishaps were first published, Helen Fielding promises to explore "a different phase" in Bridget's life.
Sixty years after James Bond made his first fictional appearance in Casino Royal, William Boyd is the latest author – following Jeffery Deaver and Sebastian Faulks – to accept the mission from the Fleming estate to write a new Bond novel.
November
The Samuel Johnson Award for non-fiction will be awarded.
December
This is currently a quiet month news-wise but it is most likely the time of year when a good many books will be purchased - perhaps some of those released earlier in the year.
Happy Reading in 2013.
January
200 years have passed since the publication of Pride and Prejudice and bosoms are still heaving after Mr Darcy even if they are a little freer than in 1813! Events are bound to be plentiful to celebrate the anniversary.
The finalists for the fifth Man Booker International prize will be announced at the Jaipur festival.
February
Release of Pow! by Mo Yan (Seagull Books). The first new novel in English from the Chinese author awarded the 2012 Nobel literature prize for his "hallucinatory realism" is a riotous carnival of food, sex and death in rural China.
Release of Gone to the Forest by Katie Kitamura (Clerkenwell Press). A white family implodes in an unnamed colonial country on the brink of civil war. I am reading lots of post-colonial theory at the moment and this seems apt.
March
The 7th is World Book Day. A Unesco-designated celebration of books marked in more than 100 countries. In the UK more than 14m book tokens will be distributed to children under 18. This can only be encouraged - more children need to discover the joy of reading.
April
The 23rd of April is Shakespeare's birth and death day and is an appropriate date for World Book Night. The books are:
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman
Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
The White Queen by Philippa Gregory
A Little History of the World by E.H Gombrich
Little Face by Sophie Hannah
Damage by Josephine Hart
The Island by Victoria Hislop
Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay
Last Night Another Soldier... by Andy McNab
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
The Reader by Bernard Schlink
No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Road Home by Rose Tremain
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson
Judge Dredd: The Dark Judges by John Wagner
Release of The Roundhouse by Louise Erdrich (Corsair). This novel about a young teenager investigating his mother's assault beat Dave Eggers and Junot Diaz to the US National Book award last year, and has been called a Native American To Kill a Mockingbird.
Release of Crossing the Bosporus by Deborah Cater. A non-fiction account of three western women with different outlooks on life travelling from Bulgaria to Istanbul.
May
Book related (I sincerely hope it does follow the book's plot) is the cinematic release of The Great Gatsby. I love the book I hope Luhrmann has done it justice.
June
Presentation of first Women's Prize for Fiction, successor to the Orange prize; the 2013 panel is chaired by Miranda Richardson.
July
Time to buy a selection of the year's earlier releases and hit the beach - not much happening in the world of books this month.
August
At least in August you can head up to Edinburgh for its International Book Festival.
September
Lots of small book festivals are scheduled in September - choose from:
Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival
The First Transylvanian Book Festival
Bleinhem Palace Literary Festival
October
Henley Literary Festival - technically it starts on the last day of September but as most of it sits in october, well here it is.
New Bridget Jones by Helen Fielding (Jonathan Cape). Seventeen years after her diaries of a singleton's comic mishaps were first published, Helen Fielding promises to explore "a different phase" in Bridget's life.
Sixty years after James Bond made his first fictional appearance in Casino Royal, William Boyd is the latest author – following Jeffery Deaver and Sebastian Faulks – to accept the mission from the Fleming estate to write a new Bond novel.
November
The Samuel Johnson Award for non-fiction will be awarded.
December
This is currently a quiet month news-wise but it is most likely the time of year when a good many books will be purchased - perhaps some of those released earlier in the year.
Happy Reading in 2013.
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