Skip to main content

Pipped at the post

Lloyd Jones had high hopes of winning the Man Booker Prize for his novel Mr Pip.
Not to be unfortunately. The award went to Irish writer Anne Enright.

I think the most surprising aspect of the news coverage was the spurious connection between the All Blacks failure at the Rugby World cup and not winning a literary prize. Wrong. One endeavour relies on the direct conflict between two equally matched teams. Literary awards are random. There is no opponent and the work was performed in different places at different times. The All Blacks played badly on the day and lost. Utterly objective. Lloyd Jones performed brilliantly but just didn't win on the day. Utterly subjective.

It's getting to the point where news media are more imaginative than advertising in the use of exaggeration and hyperbole.

By all accounts Mr Pip is very good. Here's what the Melbourne Age newspaper said.

I was rooting for Indra Sinha - crikey when did literary fiction become gladiatorial.

Comments

  1. Anonymous6:42 am

    I just finished Mr Pip and I found it disturbing but well written

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Addict-o-matic

A cool resource for you to try. Aggregates search topics from a number of sources. Thanks to Brand DNA (again) for the heads-up.

Johnny Bunko competiton

The Great Johnny Bunko Challenge from DHP on Vimeo . There's a young chap in Indiana, one Alec Quig , who has written to me about creating a career based on a polymathic degree, from which he has recently graduated. He's an interesting young man and his concerns about going forward in life are the anxieties we all face at crossroads in our lives when we are forced to make choices. Dan Pink's latest book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need might help: "From a New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Washington Post bestselling author comes a first-of-its- kind career guide for a new generation of job seekers.There's never been a career guide like it.the fully illustrated story (ingeniously told in Manga form) of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to parachute company Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early days as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to find a new job. St