Book News: Wodehouse Prize Winner
Well it might interest you to know that Ian McEwan – an author I have never enjoyed to be honest, has won the Wodehouse award for his work Solar.
So what is the Wodehouse award I hear you ask. Well, I did my research (Wikipedia obviously) and found out that this is a literary award for comic writing. The winner is announced at the Hay Festival and he/she receives champagne, all 52 volumes of the Everyman Wodehouse edition and the best prize of all: a pig is named after them! Here is a list of previous winners:
2010 Ian McEwan – Solar (Jonathan Cape)
2009 Geoff Dyer – Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (Canongate Books)
2008 Will Self – The Butt (Bloomsbury)
2007 Paul Torday – Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
2006 Christopher Brookmyre – All Fun and Games until Somebody Loses an Eye (Abacus)
2005 Marina Lewycka – A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (Viking)
2004 Jasper Fforde – The Well of Lost Plots (Hodder & Stoughton)
2003 DBC Pierre – Vernon God Little (Faber and Faber)
2002 Michael Frayn – Spies (Faber)
2001 Jonathan Coe – The Rotters’ Club (Viking)
2000 Howard Jacobson – The Mighty Walzer (Jonathan Cape)
So, it was Solar this time. But what is this book about? To find this out I turned to Waterstones:
Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her. When Beard’s professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and save the world from environmental disaster. Ranging from the Arctic Circle to the deserts of New Mexico, “Solar” is a serious and darkly satirical novel, showing human frailty struggling with the most pressing and complex problem of our time. A story of one man’s greed and self-deception, it is a profound and stylish new work from one of the world’s great writers.
So, will you be reading this one?