Small Voice, Amplified

Congratulations to 29-year-old writer Evie Wyld on her winning of the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for her book After the Fire, a Still Small Voice.   Her first novel, it follows a family in eastern Australia, and the long-term effects created by a legacy of war and violence.


Past winners of the award -- which is for writers from UK and Commonwealth under 35 -- include Margaret Drabble and Jeannette Winterson.    We particularly like hearing that author -- when she is not writing -- is a bookseller.

 

Hat tip to the Granta website for the info.

 

-BILL TIPPER

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February 11: Nelson Mandela was released from prison on this day in 1990. The recent anthology Conversations with Myself samples from decades of archived material in an attempt to "give readers access to the Nelson Mandela…

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Alice James

"The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," Jean Strouse writes of her subject's more famous brothers, "Alice simply lived." It took a biographer of sensitivity and brilliance to give that "simply" the profundity it deserves, and the resulting book, now reissued in the peerless NYRB Classics series, is one of the richest life stories you'll ever read.

Midnight in Austenland

The world of Jane Austen's fiction has long been an imaginative playground for writers and readers of a certain stripe. Shannon Hale's Austenland wittily took the next step, setting comic romance in a faux-Pemberly resort for the Darcy-smitten. Her latest returns for more Regency fun, but with a twist: does murder stalk Pembrook Park?

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Childlike retreat? Arts and crafts challenge? Frugal and eco-friendly living option? The notion of the "tiny house" has the surprising potential to fire the imagination. In this exuberant volume of sketches, plans, and commentary, the artist Derek Diedricksen shares his infectious enthusiasm for the idea of the micro-mansion.