The former archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has added his voice to a campaign for organ donation. In a 19-line poem”Host Organism”, described on the Guardian website, Williams – now master of Magdalene College, Cambridge – takes an oblique line on transplants, imagining surgeons as gardeners and donors as “unnamed birds”. The poem is intended to assist National Transplant Week, running until 14 July.
This indispensable guide to the publishing industry is now available, also a Children’s Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook is due to be published in August. Orders before 31 July carry a 25% discount.
Pablo Nerida’s body is to be disinterred in order to ascertain if he was poisoned by orders of the Pinochet regime rather than having died from a heart attack while suffering from cancer of the prostate. Suspicions were first voiced by Neruda’s chauffeur and although they are not backed by Neruda’s widow they have not died down. It is unclear if a post mortem will be able to establish definitively how he died. The Wikipedia article on Neruda gives as good background as any and there’s a piece on the decision to disinter in today’s Guardian.
The Agatha Christie Miscellany by Cathy Cook (The History Press, £9.99) is just out. There’s a good piece in the Independent on the book and on Agatha’s writing methods by the ‘Blagger’. Crime is an interesting genre from the point of view of the self-publisher, it has the advantage of a well-established niche.
To date we have helped with the publication of little that could be considered scientific, but there’s no harm aiming high. The Wellcome Trust are finalising plans and procedures for the Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize 2013. Publishers are permitted to submit up to three books or manuscripts. The Trust is obliged to narrow the field but since only 1% of manuscripts submitted to publishers are subsequently published by them (historically this includes books self published by Jane Austen, James Joyce, Beatrix Potter and Edgar Allen Poe to name but four of many), the Trust is using a very blunt instrument in order to reduce its workload.
A new book by the injured ballet dancer Andrej Uspenski Dancers, published by Oberon Books, gives an unusually informal record of ballet dancers behind the scenes. For those of use who like dancing but are overawed by the professionals, it’s good to see their human side. There’s a good review by Jane Shilling in the Telegraph.
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Self Publishing
A Short History, from the Ten Commandments to Kindle E-Books
Why do some people get to speak and others only to listen? Who controls the written word? On Friday 22 February at 2.00 pm, at the Castle Hotel Bishop’s Castle, Bob Fowke will be tracing the history of self-publishing (and publishing) from the Word of God to Kindle E-books, with a sideways swipe at censorship through the ages, the Inquisition, Louis XIV, intellectual snobbery and Rupert Murdoch. From King Enmebaragesi of Sumeria to Mark Twain via Daniel Defoe, no stone is left unturned – well, quite a lot of them since he’s only got an hour.