Hi\nAlphas,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Welcome\nto Alphaday 3, Season XVI. Our season is now in full swing after the gentle\nlead-up while we set everything in motion. It\u2019s now up to you to make the most\nof it and join in all things writerly from the actual writing and feedback, to\nsharing your experiences and your background reading. Hopefully this will\nmotivate you to progress with your own writing or inspire you to try out\nsomething new. The company of like-minded writers \u2013 even in the virtual setting\nof Alpha \u2013 is a great incentive to write more and write better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As\nusual the efficient Alpha team has been busy preparing our first full Alphaday\nagenda. As usual our agenda relies entirely on the input of every Alpha in the\nform of challenge entries, feedback and participation in our other activities. Thank\nyou to all and sundry!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alphaday 3, Season\nXVI agenda:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Mouth-watering,\nisn\u2019t it? That should keep you occupied for a while and make you grab your pen\n\/ stab your keyboard to join in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ***<\/p>\n\n\n\n As\nthere\u2019s no special Alpha news I\u2019ll move straight on to the general news<\/strong>. I\u2019ll steer clear of the \u2018omnishambles\u2019 (a recent\naddition to the Oxford Dictionary because of its frequent appearance in\njournalism \u2013 and very expressive, I think!) and concentrate on the exciting \u2013\nie. the literary \u2013 news about all the massive prizes that are being strewn like\nconfetti on the most brilliant writers of our time: fame and fortune for doing\nthat which we all love doing: writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s\nthe Nobel Prize for literature, this time awarded for two years because somebody\non the committee misbehaved and they missed the one last year. Looks like\nthey\u2019ve misbehaved again but this time to award fame and fortune to the tune of\n\u00a3750,000 to a writer who, as somebody put it, shows \u201cshocking ethical\nblindness\u201d. Apparently Peter Handke doesn\u2019t have any regrets about his refusal\nto see anything wrong with the genocide of Serbian Muslims in the 1990s. He\u2019s a\nbrilliant writer, they say, and the prize is for his writing. Tricky one, that.\nThe 2018 prize was given to a Polish writer called Olga Tokarczuk. I\u2019d be happy to read a\nbook of hers if I find one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On a much smaller scale\nwe have the BBC short story prize. It\u2019s a national prize which means you have\nto be a UK resident. Fame and fortune \u2013 \u00a315,000 \u2013 was awarded to Jo Lloyd for The Invisible, <\/em>a story about an invented\nmyth of an invisible family with a gorgeous privileged life that comes to\nfascinate a small rural, Welsh community. <\/p>\n\n\n\n All four shortlisted\nauthors were women \u2026 that\u2019s just by-the-by! I listened to the stories on Radio\n4 podcasts and I loved every one of them. Apart from the one about a\nshape-shifting mother who was ordered to stick to being an ordinary woman, the\nstories were realistic on the surface, but with a mysterious element that\ncarried the story on to a different level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally there\u2019s the\nBooker Prize which I\u2019m addicted to following from longlist to final\nannouncement. I haven\u2019t read any of the books \u2013 yet \u2013 but I\u2019ve read reviews and\nlistened to Radio 4 Front Row interviews with the shortlisted authors. The first\nprize is worth \u00a350,000 which may seem like peanuts compared to the Nobel Prize\n(and to some Euromillion jackpots that are won for zero merit!) but there\u2019s\nalso the fame that goes with it, and as this is now an international prize\nwhere the only criterion is that the novel must be written in English, the fame\nis world-wide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I confess I didn\u2019t want\neither of the two literary giants, Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie, to win.\nI read several of their books about 30 years ago when they first won the Booker\nPrize. Atwood in particular has had more than enough publicity lately and her\nbook, The Testaments, <\/em>has already\nsold massively and the TV series of The\nHandmaid\u2019s Tale <\/em>has undoubtedly boosted the interest in this novel \u2026 as she\nherself acknowledged. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Would I have chosen\nBernardine Evaristo\u2019s Girl Woman Other? <\/em>Perhaps.\nIt\u2019s concerned with world-wide problems \u2013 as are all the shortlisted novels.\nMinorities, oppression, inequality, totalitarianism, etc. That\u2019s one thing that\nstands out. The other thing that I found curious and very interesting is that\nseveral of the shortlisted novels don\u2019t use punctuation in the usual way.\nEvaristo\u2019s novel is one of them. The other is Lucy Ellman\u2019s Ducks Newburyport. <\/em>It\u2019s 1,020 pages\nlong; is written as interior monologue in (more or less) one, long sentence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Wow! I\u2019m thinking:\nchallenge brief. Somebody prepared to set it (for 300 words)?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Christine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hi Alphas, Welcome to Alphaday 3, Season XVI. Our season is now in full swing after the gentle lead-up while we set everything in motion. 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