Philip Pullman has made it onto the finalist list of the Man Booker International Prize. The list was presented at a press conference at the University of Sydney on the 30th of March.
The judges of this year’s Man Booker International are, writer, academic and rare-book dealer Dr. Rick Gekoski, publisher, writer and critic Carmen Callil, and award-winning novelist Justin Cartwright.
When he announced the list, the judges’ chair Dr. Gekoski said, “The 2011 List of Finalists honours thirteen great writers from around the world. It is, we think, diverse, fresh and thought-provoking, and serves to remind us anew of the importance of fiction in defining both ourselves and the world in which we live. Each of these writers is a delight, and any of them would make a worthy winner.”
Peter, (aka Ceres Wunderkind), a long-time BridgeToTheStars staff member and prolific His Dark Materials fanfiction writer, has written a Kindle e-book, a collection of short stories called The Boy and other tales of the supernatural.
“In turn funny and serious, fearful and comforting, these are tales of the borderland – of the school where the magic of the elder powers of the Vale of White Horse is never far away, of the white witches and their demonic foes, of secret friends who suddenly take physical form, of the gods who are hanging on the phone, waiting for us to call.”
This Kindle e-book is available to buy on both amazon.co.uk
and amazon.com.
Philip Pullman is set to be one of the featured speakers at the upcoming Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival event alongside HRH the Princess Royal, Jacqueline Wilson, Michael Rosen and Eoin Colfer. The festival will run from Saturday the 2nd till Sunday the 8th of April.
Pullman’s event, about the construction of an author’s voice in fiction and poetry, will be at 10 AM on Saturday the 2nd of April. Tickets are £10 each and are available to buy here.
If you’re attending this event – please let us know! We’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
Philip Pullman has revealed to BridgeToTheStars his new project: a retelling of some of the tales of the Brothers Grimm. “This isn’t a book for children only,” he shared with us. “I’m telling the best of the tales in my own voice, and I’m finding it a great purifier of narrative thinking, rather as a pianist relishes playing Bach’s preludes and fugues as a sort of palate-cleansing discipline.”
In the past Pullman has mentioned the Grimm’s Fairy Tales as one of the books that have made the most difference to his life.
