You may have noticed a small logo that has appeared in the top right-hand corner of this page announcing that this blog is (just!) one of the 100 top Uk and Ireland literary blogs at No 91.
Some years ago I read an article suggesting that there were so many literary prizes and awards that you had to try pretty hard to avoid securing one. Having never won a literary prize (though I was once on a shortlist of six for the Marsh Biography Prize alongside weighty literati like Roy Hattersley) I assure you that it is easier than people claim to avoid winning anything. So let's throw our hats in the air to Wikio (whomsoever they be) for this unexpected garland.
It makes me feel I should be blogging more regularly. I have, like many literary bloggers, been flagging a bit recently so let this be a wake-up call.
A Postscript on Literary Elections
I am currently reading V.S. Naipaul's 1958 novel The Suffrage of Elvira and it is a wonderfully witty story about an election in Trinidad circa 1950. Much more fun than page after page in the Sunday papers dribbling on about whether X looked better on TV than Y. Having not long ago read his first novel, The Mystic Masseur (1957) I have become a great fan of Naipaul's early work.
2 comments:
It would be wonderful to read what you make of the Naipaul novel. I had the great pleasure of living for two months very close to his birthplace in Trinidad but contrived to never quite get around to reading his work -
thanks for sharing and congratulations on you 91st ness.
Hannah
Well, I think the appeal of these early novels is the humour and the sharpness of the observation and the wonderful local patois but I can well see that some might feel that he is making fun of people's speech and that some sort of "post-colonial" box is not being ticked. (On the other hand he is entitled to write about his own community in any way he wants; he is not an outsider.) I started with Naipaul through his later novel "The Enigma of Arrival" which, in its steady, unshowy way is I think quite remarkable.
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