Dec 14 2010
[from Iceland Review Online, December 13th 2010]:
The nominations for the 2010 Icelandic Literary Prize were announced earlier this month. Two prizes are handed out, for Fiction/Poetry and Non-Fiction, with five nominees in each category. Two three-person juries will decide who the winners are.
Dec 07 2010
[Ken Chisholm, Cape Breton Post, December 3rd 2010]:
My own theory, having worked in three bookshops through the years, is that Cape Bretoners are great readers, they are great supporters of locally produced culture, and when someone puts the two together, the support grows geometrically.
For the past two months, in Sydney alone, there has been a book launch at least every week. And there are other events happening in communities all over the island such as the launch of Teresa O’Brien’s short story collection “The Keys” (Breton Books), in Glace Bay.
And there are other literary events through the year, the summer poetry readings in Main-a-Dieu, the Cabot Trail literary festival in the autumn, locally written plays in St. Anns Bay and Inverness, and the monthly “Authors With Glasses” sessions at Governor’s Pub in Sydney. This past week, I enjoyed a well attended evening of readings of Robertson Davies’s Christmas ghost stories at the McConnell library (which is in the business of hosting popular literary events).
Dec 01 2010
Gerður Kristný is hard to pin down. In the sixteen years since the appearance of her first poetry book, she has authored eighteen titles of bewildering diversity – novels, short story collections, children’s books, a biography, a travelogue and, yes, a whole lot of poetry.
The year 2010 has been good to Gerður. She started it off by receiving the Jón úr Vör Poetry Prize, then went on to collect the Guðmundur Böðvarsson Poetry Prize, and in early November her children’s book Garðurinn (The Garden) received the West Nordic Children’s Literature Prize.
This fall, she published her newest poetry book, titled Blóðhófnir (Bloodhoof) and based on an ancient Eddic poem. The response, so far, is positive. The critic Úlfhildur Dagsdóttir, for one, did not mince words in her verdict: “Let’s get it out of the way: Gerður’s book about her mythical namesake – the young giantess forced to marry the god Freyr – is simply brilliant. [...] There’s really nothing more to be said about it.“ The grand old man of poetry Þorsteinn frá Hamri, in his turn called the book “a heavyweight.”
Oct 19 2010
[Aisha K. Down, The Harvard Crimson, October 19th 2010]:
Sturla is a middle-aged Icelandic poet travelling to a poetry festival in Lithuania. He is prone to remarking on his role as an ambassador of his small nation to this other, even more out-of-the-way place. But though he makes it clear that he is reading his poetry as a representative of Iceland, he is not entirely sure that wants to be a poet anymore. He’s not quite sure what his poetry means—in fact, he’s not sure that poets should know what their poetry means at all. He seems far more worried about the fact that he’s lost the hazelnut he’d picked up as a good luck charm than he does about poetic matters.
Oct 19 2010
[Tara Bradbury, The Telegram, October 15th 2010]:
He’s made the shortlist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, and local playwright Robert Chafe heard the news the fastest way news travels these days: Facebook.
Oct 11 2010
[Iceland Review Online, October 9th 2010]:
Contracts have been made on the publishing of around 100 works of literature in Germany in the next 12 months that will be translated from Icelandic or feature Iceland. The first press conference in relation to Iceland being the guest of honor at the 2011 Frankfurt Book Fair was held on Thursday.
Oct 11 2010
[Edward Hill, 'Victoria News', October 8th 2010]:
In terms of literary awards, the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize is the new kid on the block, but the competition is as fierce as any in Canada.
For the Butler prize, the jury whittled down 38 entries to a short list of five: a miraculous feat considering the quality of authors in the Capital Region, said Lorna McDonald, president of the Victoria Book Prize Society. The Bolen Books children’s book prize had a list of 17 entrants, but is down to three.
Sep 13 2010
[From the blog 'An Ontarian in Newfoundland], September 12th 2010]:
I read this, and think “William Carlos Williams visited Labrador?” What followed was one of those flurries of activity that was, essentially, a distraction from the work I needed to do, but which felt like productive research. As it turns out, Williams visited Newfoundland and Labrador in 1933 on a cruise with his wife. That relatively short—two weeks—vacation left an impression. The cruise took them up the west coast, as far north as St. Anthony’s. I found some references to this in William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked, a biography by Paul Mariani.
Sep 13 2010
[Hannah Kent, from the blog 'Killings', September 13th 2010]:
I have always tried hard not to mysticise the creative process. To me, imagination, although precious and powerful, is not supernatural; ideas come to us through a process of conscious and subconscious suggestion. Writers draw upon facts, or experience; they write from a position of knowledge or in pursuit of it. There’s no magic, sadly. No divine intervention.
Or so I thought. If, one month ago, someone had told me that a writer of historical fiction could utilise the ‘hunch’, that inexplicable, intuitive persuasion that comes out of the blue, uncalled for, unfounded and seemingly irrational, to achieve historical accuracy and verisimilitude otherwise only attainable through research, I would have sneered. However, that was one month ago.
In August this year I travelled to Iceland to research the life of a woman called Agnes Magnusdottir, a servant born in 1795, and the subject of my PhD. Agnes Magnusdottir was the last person to be formally executed in Iceland before the death penalty was abolished in 1928. Beheaded by broad axe in 1830, at the age of 34, Agnes was killed for her role in the violent murder of two men and the act of arson that attempted to burn their bodies.
Sep 12 2010
[Shannon Webb-Campbell, Telegraph-Journal, September 4th 2010]:
“Glimpse is really an allusion to the brief moment of interaction the poet has with the universe, those glimpses of answer, most of which never last long enough to be useful,” says poet George Murray, at Hava Java in St. John’s. Water Street is bustling this Saturday, the café a cacophony of conversation.
“They’re little windows that show a junction between two or four pieces of the greater puzzle, but they’re enough to feel as though the moment has a use.”
The Newfoundland-based Murray is a modern poet. Unlike many of his peers who are from the island, he has Ontario roots but couldn’t imagine a more perfect place to be a writer. Not one to limit his scope to geography, he’s lived all over the globe. More and more Murray has noticed the lexicon of Newfoundland showing up in his work.