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A Look at the Booker Prize for Literature

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                                                                                           A Look at the Booker Prize for Literature     I recently noted that Anne Michaels had been shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize for her novel  Held (2023). I had read her earlier novel,  Fugitive Pieces  (1996), about the displacement of children during World War Two, some years ago and I had included discussion of it in a course I was teaching about Canadian Literature for The Workers’ Educational Association (WEA).  Held , published many years later and which I received as a Christmas present, is a very different book: it is an account of the development of the generations within a family, who are dealing with events from the early twentieth to the twenty-first century.   I have some history with the Booker prize. When I began teaching literature to a WEA group in the 2000s, I needed some guidance in making a choice of novels that we could read together. These WEA classes had a remarkable
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I Challenge Thee to Mortal Combat... with Scorpers by Griselda Heppel

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Many years ago, at the height of Britain’s football hooliganism problems, I came across a delicious comedy sketch on BBC Radio 4 which went something like this:  Policeman : I'm arresting you for affray leading to grievous bodily harm, with intention to commit. Do you have anything to say?  Lout : Yeah, well, it were like this. Me and my mates was just leavin’ Waiting for Godot at the Prince Edward theatre, like, when these guys come up to us and start rantin’ and swearin’ that Beckett’s rubbish, everyone knows that, not a patch on Chekhov whose Three Sisters could wipe the floor wiv us, yeah, and our muvvers too. Well, that crossed a line that did, I’m not takin’ that lyin’ down. So yes, officer, I did clock ‘im one but there’s provocation, see.  Laugh-out loud comedy, ah those were the days.  Having the temerity to issue a challenge.  Photo by Daisa TJ: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-holding-sword-3408420/ Anyway, this popped into my mind because recently I had the temerity
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Sometimes co-incidences are stranger than fiction! And it can be wonderful.

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  The weirdest things have happened to me this month. I’ve been super-busy, as I always am. I’m reprising my role as Patricia Highsmith in a play, Writing Crime in Akenfield, by local author Suzanne Hawkes, which returns to the stage in October. I’ve also been editing my novel, which launches in December, and trying to help other creatives by championing their various projects. I lost two family members in the last fortnight, and so it got me thinking about how life changes and whether there is an afterlife. You know, simple little questions like that! I’m not a church-goer, and not a consciously religious person, but I would describe myself as quite a spiritual person, maybe an ‘intrigued agnostic’ and always happy to approach anything with an open mind. I have certainly had several interesting spiritual experiences which would not rule out the existence of some sort of afterlife, as they were too unusual to explain by any rational means. In a contemplative state of mind, I found myse
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'A rediscovered gem of a fairytale' -- Susan Price

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 In January 2024, I'm quite chuffed to say, my book The Ghost Drum was reviewed in The Times by Lucy Bannerman, as 'Children's Book of the Week.' Ghost Drum by Susan Price review — a rediscovered gem of a fairytale Narrated by a cat on a golden chain, this Carnegie winning story of a young shaman fighting back against a brutal ‘Czardom’ is breathtaking Lucy Bannerman Saturday January 27 2024, 12.01am, The Times My word. Ghost Drum isn’t just a gem; it’s the Fabergé egg of fairytales. Having fallen out of print, this electrifying story is now being reissued as part of Faber’s Young Adult Classics series and what a treat it is. We begin on a midwinter night “in a far-away Czardom” when a stranger knocks on the door and persuades a slave woman to hand over her newborn baby. “The snow is so deep that the houses are half-buried in it, and the frost so hard that it grips the houses and squeezes them till they crack.” The stranger is a (good) witch who raises th
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