At the Fortnum & Mason Food & Drink Awards 2014 on 13 May Kerstin Rodgers won the Online Food Writer award for her blog, msmarmitelover.com. Her next book, coming this August from Square Peg, is Ms Marmite Lover's Secret Tea Party.
Writer/director confirmed for Solzhenitsyn film
Primeridian Entertainment has hired Cyrus Nowrasteh to write and direct a film on Soviet dissident and Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, based on D.M. Thomas's Orwell Prize-winning biography Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century In His Life.
"It's a privilege to tell the courageous story of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn," said the director. "Millions suffered and died in the Soviet labor camps. As a survivor, he resolved to tell the world about it. The power of his pen, despite the suppression of his work and every effort to silence his voice, helped bring about the downfall of one of the greatest tyrannies mankind has ever known."
Solzhenitsyn was a Red Army officer who, after being accused of anti-Soviet propaganda, was imprisoned by Stalin in the gulag system in February 1945. The period later became the basis for his three-volume The Gulag Archipelago, a chronicle of his ordeal as captive in the Soviet forced labor camp system, unacknowledged during the Stalinist era. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, was expelled from the former Soviet Union in 1974, and lived in exile in Vermont until he was able to return to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the mid-1990s. Solzhenitsyn died in 2008.
See the full story here: http://www.deadline.com/2013/05/cannes-cyrus-nowrasteh-to-helm-film-on-soviet-dissident-alexander-solzhenitsyn/
Dr Thomas Dixon presents BBC Radio 4 series on friendship
Dr Thomas Dixon will present a new series 'Five Hundred Years of Friendship' on BBC Radio 4. The series launches on Monday 24th March with Thomas comparing social networks in the 16th century with those of today. This is the beginning of an absorbing story in which both the similarities and the differences between friendship past and present emerge.
The series will be supported by blog posts on the History of Emotions Blog at Queen Mary, University of London, where Thomas is the Director of the Centre for the History of the Emotions.
C. J. Driver at Nelson Mandela Memorial
Our long-standing author C. J. Driver was proud to be one of the readers at the memorial service for Nelson Mandela in Westminster Abbey on 3rd March.
The service was attended by HRH Prince Harry, PM David Cameron, South African Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, and the first UK performance from the Soweto Gospel Choir
Jonty Driver is the former President of the National Union of South African Students, and read a passage from Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, taken from the Robben Island 'Bible'.
He is currently working on a short biography of John Harris, who was the only white man executed in South Africa (though not the only one assassinated) for having put a bomb in the Johannesburg station. Harris's warning to the police to clear the station was either not heeded or was too late, and a bystander was killed and more bystanders severely burned.
Greaves shortlisted for Waterstones Children's Book Prize 2014
The Skull in the Wood, the debut novel by Sandra Greaves has been shortlisted for the prestigious Waterstones Children's Book Prize 2014. The prize was set up to honour the very best new and emergent writers of children’s fiction, and has helped to launch the careers of previous winners and shortlisted authors including John Boyne, Siobhan Dowd and Sally Nicholls.
Greaves’ gothic tale for children aged 9-12 skilfully blends setting and myth to create a startlingly original ghost story. With dogs turning wild in the rolling mists of Dartmoor and a resurrected ancient curse, this book will have young readers quaking under the covers.
THE BULLET CATCHER'S DAUGHTER to Angry Robot
Angry Robot has signed a two-book deal for alternate history books from Rod Duncan. Publishing director Marc Gascoigne did the deal with Ed Wilson of Johnson & Alcock for world English language rights. The series will be called The Fall of the Gaslit Empire, with first title The Bullet Catcher's Daughter released in September 2014, and the sequel,Unseemly Science following in 2015.
The books follow Elizabeth Barnabus, who lives a double life posing as her private detective brother, and the problems she faces when she comes up against the all-powerful patent office.
LIVE AT THE BRIXTON ACADEMY launched in style
A star-studded launch for LIVE AT THE BRIXTON ACADEMY was held at the exclusive members' club Apt48, with authors Simon Parkes and JS Rafaeli both signing books.
The exclusive insight into the genesis and first thirty years of London's most iconic music venue, LIVE AT THE BRIXTON ACADEMY is serealised in The Mail on Sunday, and Simon has been interviewed in the Guardian and for Front Row on Radio 4.
N Quentin Woolf picked in GQ Top 10 books of 2014
N Quentin Woolf's stunning Debut THE DEATH OF THE POET has been chosen by GQ magazine as one of the Top 10 books to read in 2014: see here.
The book "explores what it means to be a man and what one will endure for love in the modern world, from post-WWI England to Nineties America", and will be published on 4th April by Serpent's Tail.