Shortlist

Caroline Bird
TROUBLE CAME TO THE TURNIP

Caroline Bird was born in 1986. She grew up in Leeds and attended the Steiner School in York before moving to London in 2001. She won the Poetry Society's Simon Elvin Young Poet of the Year Award two years running (1999 and 2000) and won an Eric Gregory Award in 2002. Her poems have appeared in PN Review, Poetry Review, The North magazine and in Carcanet's New Poetries III anthology (2002). Her first collection, Looking Through Letterboxes, built on the traditions of fairy tale, fantasy and romance, was published in 2002. Her second collection, Trouble Came to the Turnip, was published in September 2006. She is currently studying English at Oxford University.

In Trouble Came to the Turnip, Bird’s poems are ferociously vital, fantastical, sometimes violent, almost always savagely humorous and self-mocking. Her world is inhabited by failed and (less often) successful relationships, by the dizzying crisis of early adulthood, by leprechauns and spells and Miss Pringle's seven lovely daughters waiting to spring out of a cardboard cake. And the turnip.

ISBN 1-85754-887-6

Ceridwen Dovey
BLOOD KIN

Ceridwen was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, in 1980. Ceridwen grew up mostly in the small town of East London in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, but she and sister Liniwe went to high school in Sydney. After a year in London working and travelling, she did her undergraduate study at Harvard on scholarship, focusing on Social Anthropology and Visual & Environmental Studies (Film). Ceridwen moved to Cape Town for two years, where she wrote Blood Kin as her thesis for the Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town, with poet Stephen Watson as her supervisor. She now lives in New York City.

Blood Kin is a story of a president overthrown by a military coup in a nameless country, and in the midst of mass arrests, three members of the Presidential household – his barber, chef and portraitist – are taken hostage in a remote mountain palace. As the order falls, the truth about these men and significant lives is revealed, and the web of complicity and duplicity begins to unravel. Dovey’s mesmerizing debut grapples with humanity’s most mercenary and animalistic instincts, and reminds the reader that the mad king is within us all.

ISBN 978-1-84354-657-3

Edward Hogan
BLACKMOOR

Edward Hogan was born in Derby, in 1980. He was working in Nottingham's Council House when he was writing his first novel. After leaving school Edward enrolled on the University of East Anglia's MA in Creative Writing course, winning the David Higham Award. After graduating he was signed up with publisher Simon & Schuster. Since the launch of Blackmoor Edward's been named as 'a writer to watch' by Peter Carty in The Independent whilst authors Miriam Toews and Hilary Mantel are also fans.

The book Blackmoor centres around a small mining community and Edward says he chose this setting because he wanted to find out more about the place he grew up. It's a regional book, about the midlands and the north and what has happened to the mining communities since people have stopped mining. His split time-frame is combined with multiple narrative perspectives, which enable him to dig deep into his characters. He is aided by writing that is charged with a bite and passion harking back to his Northern forebears; D.H. Lawrence, most obviously, with a passing touch of Charlotte Brontë.

ISBN 978-1-84737-098-3

Nam Le
THE BOAT

Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia. He has received the Pushcart Prize, the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, and fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Phillips Exeter Academy. His fiction has appeared in venues including Zoetrope: All-Story, A Public Space, Conjunctions, One Story, NPR's, Selected Shorts and the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best New American Voices, Best Australian Stories, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He is the fiction editor of the Harvard Review.

The Boat is a stunningly inventive, deeply moving fiction debut: stories that take the readers from the slums of Colombia to the streets of Tehran; from New York City to Iowa City; from a tiny fishing village in Australia to a foundering vessel in the South China Sea, in a masterful display of literary virtuosity and feeling. In the opening story, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," a young writer is urged by his friends to mine his father's experiences in Vietnam — and what seems at first a satire on turning one's life into literary commerce becomes a transcendent exploration of homeland, and the ties between father and son.

ISBN 978-1-84767-160-8

Dinaw Mengestu
CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Ethiopia in 1978 and is a graduate of Georgetwon and Columbia Universities. He works as a journalist and reviewer and is researching a book tracing his extended family’s exile from Ethiopia following the 1974 revolution. Children of the Revolution won the Guardian First Book Award in 2007.

Children of the revolution is a book about one man’s longing for the American dream, and of the tenacious grip of the past across continents and time. It is a tale of an Ethiopian immigrant’s search for acceptance, peace and identity. With effortless prose, Mengestu makes the reader feel this tortured soul’s longings, regrets, and in the end, his dreams of meaningful human connection.

ISBN 978-0-22407-931-0

Ross Raisin
GOD’S OWN COUNTRY

Ross Raisin was born in Yorkshire and now lives in London. He is twenty-seven years old. Before university he spent time working in the hotel trade, working in hotels in France and Ireland. When he graduated, he began working in a wine bar in London, eventually becoming co-manager. Ross has continued to work as a waiter while writing the novel, and still does so now as he begins his second, a novel about a Glaswegian ex-shipyard worker, whose life unravels after the death of his wife.

God’s Own Country is told through the eyes of the narrator, Sam Marsdyke - the teenage son of a farmer up on the Yorkshire Moors, who spends his days working the sheep, mending fences and trying to dodge the eye of his brutal, silent father, around him. One day a young daughter of a new family catches his eye. As he falls for the young, sophisticated girl from London, she begins to see him as a means to escape but this journey across the moors takes a terrifying menacing turn which, for Sam, will prove his terrible undoing.

ISBN 978-0-67091-734-1