Less than a fortnight ago, Route assembled a team of writers to gather stories told at the Musicport World Music festival in Bridlington, a small port on the Yorkshire coast. Ian Clayton and Ian Daley have now assembled those stories into a book. The result is a quirky, moving and very human account of three days at one of Europe’s best loved gatherings for World Music.

There are stories from over one hundred people; the audience, the backstage crew, the caterers, the volunteers and the musicians, including Hugh Masekela, Mary Coughlan, Iain Matthews, Mari Boine and World Music journeyman Andy Kershaw.

Signed edition for early orders.

*Orders for a special first edition are now being taken. Any orders received by 1 December 2011 will receive a numbered and signed edition.

The book is released on 5 December.

Click here for more details and a clip of Mary Coughlan performing at the festival.

Route are delighted to announce that Sophie Coulombeau is the winner of the 2011 Route Author Competition. Her novel provisionally titled Rites beat off strong competition from a group of exceptionally talented authors under the age of 30 to win a publishing contract. The novel will be published next Summer.

Sophie said of the award: ‘I’m over the moon to be selected as the Route Young Author and very grateful to the Arts Council and the team of editors and readers at Route who have given me the opportunity to develop and publish my manuscript. This is an incredible opportunity for a young writer in an industry that is notoriously hard to crack. I’m very excited about the months ahead and the publication of my novel in 2012.’

Sophie was born in London in 1984, and grew up mainly in Manchester. She did her undergraduate degree in English Literature at Trinity College, Oxford, and has done postgraduate research at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of York. She has also worked for the Ministry of Justice and the European Commission’s Organised Crime unit. She currently lives in York.

Her book tells the story of a group of four teenagers who make a pact to lose their virginity away from the watchful eyes of parents and priest. Ten years later, they look back on the events and unravel how it all went horribly wrong.

Route Editor Ian Daley said of the award, ‘We are thrilled to be publishing this book and to be working with Sophie. She’s a great talent, with an exciting future in front of her. The book manages to have that rare combination of being both richly complex and a riveting read. The pages simply turn themselves. I’m confident that this is the first of many great books that Sophie will produce.’

The Route Young Author competition was supported by Arts Council England and invited authors aged 18 to 30 to submit manuscripts. Following a rigorous selection procedure, five authors were shortlisted before Sophie was declared the overall winner. The other four shortlisted authors were Sally Ashton, Caroline Hargreaves, Matthew T Potter and Amy Robson.

The award also created mentoring opportunities for two young editors to work on the project. The successful applicants, Victoria Price and Rebecca Pedley, have been instrumental in the selection process and will continue to work with Sophie and see the winning book through to publication.

Free Content – New Script
Operation Phantom Fury is a new short script from Paul Laverty written on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. A Scottish soldier twenty years from now looks back on the horrors of Fallujah. Read it on our blog.

Free Content – New Track
The Overexposed is a new track from Mark Gwynne Jones and The Psychicbread, taken from their Peak District residency ‘Lyric in Limestone’. This track was recorded live on Bleaklow and reflects on a B29 bomber that crashed in the high peak. Listen online or download MP3.

Book Preview Event – 9 November
We have been busy putting together a very exciting programme of books for 2012. The first of these, Ada Wilson’s Red Army Faction Blues, will be previewed at a special event on 9 November, which will include the UK Premier of a short film and live music. Details on the event and the significance of the date can be found here.

La Rochelle by Michael Nath has been shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, one of the oldest and most prestigious book prizes awarded for literature written in the English language and Britain’s oldest literary award.

In response to the announcement Michael Nath commented, ‘The nomination is a terrific compliment, it’s a genuine honour to be shortlisted for a literary prize selected and judged by scholars.’

The James Tait Black Prizes were first presented in 1919. There are two awards, given respectively to works of Fiction and Biography written in English and published in the previous calendar year. Each is worth £10,000 to the winner. The awards were set up by the widow of James Tait Black, one of the founders of the publisher, A & C Black.

The winner is selected by the Professor of English Literature at Edinburgh University, assisted by PhD students. The absence of critics or any other ‘celebrity’ judges, along with the prizes’ considerable heritage, make them among the most respected awards in publishing. Authors may only win each award once; no author has yet managed to win in both categories.

The prizes’ pedigree is confirmed by the many illustrious names who have won. The Fiction Prize has been given to, amongst others, E M Forster, Siegfried Sassoon, Aldous Huxley, D H Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, Beryl Bainbridge, Angela Carter, John le Carré and Bruce Chatwin. Biographers honoured include Lytton Strachey, Antonia Fraser, Richard Ellman, Martin Amis, Victoria Glendinning, Gitta Sereny and Michael Holroyd.

Four victorious authors have gone on to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, William Golding, Nadine Gordimer, J M Coetzee and Doris Lessing.

The four shortlisted novels competing for this year’s £10,000 fiction prize are:

The Thousand Autumns of Jacon De Zoet by David Mitchell
La Rochelle by Michael Nath
The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli

The shortlisted works for the biography section are:

Fordlandia: the Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin
A Life in Pictures by Alasdair Gray
EM Forster : a new life by Wendy Moffat
Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China by Hilary Spurling

The winner will be announced at ceremony at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August. Full details of the shortlist can be found here. A full list of previous winners and background information on the prize can be found here.

Click here for more details on La Rochelle.

ii. Writers News

Following several months of hard reading we have finally worked our way through all the manuscripts submitted to our A Few Good Books opening. This process took longer than we anticipated, due in part to the overwhelming volume of texts submitted, and we’d like to thank authors for their patience as we worked our way through their writing. In total we received just over 170 submissions, from which we drew up a longlist of 45 titles. There was a great deal of quality in those longlisted titles, leaving us with many more possibilities than we could have prudently coped with. After much thought and careful assessment, we are now considering six books from the list for publication. This comprises of two novels, two short story collections, a memoir and a diary. We look forward to making more announcements on these titles as we progress. All authors who submitted have now been contacted.

Our current submission round is to seek out Yorkshire’s next great young novelist, and we are soliciting submissions from authors aged 18-30 who live in Yorkshire. The deadline for entries in 31 May 2011. We are not currently seeking submissions outside this category, but anticipate that we will post new guidelines once this process is cleared, probably some time in the autumn.

1. Even the Rain
Written by Paul Laverty Directed by Icíar Bollaín

‘At a time when the poor of the world seem to be rising up, I found myself deeply moved and completely enthralled by this film.’ – Michael Moore

The book of the multi-award winning film. Inspired by US Historian Howard Zinn, the tells the parallel story of Columbus’s arrival in America and the exploitation he unleashed and the modern day Water Wars of Cochabamba, Bolivia. Five hundred years separate the events, but the rhetoric remains the same.

The screenplay reads as dramatically as any novel, and despite winning a hatful of international awards and filling cinemas around the world, the chances of widespread cinematic distribution in this culturally isolated isle remain slim, so don’t let this beautiful and powerful story pass you by. Available in paperback and for Kindle. Click here for more details.

2. In Praise of Reading and Fiction
by Mario Vargas Llosa

‘I learned to read at the age of five, in Brother Justiniano’s class at the De la Salle Academy in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me.’

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2010 was awarded to the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa ‘for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat’. In his Nobel lecture, In Praise of Reading and Fiction, he describes reading and fiction as a parallel life where we can take refuge against adversity. The lecture is now published as a free eBook on the Route website in EPUB and PDF formats, plus a Kindle version too. Click here for more details.

3. Following Che’s Bolivian Footsteps
by Ann Wright

‘Many are his compatriots from neighbouring Argentina, born when to merely mention the name of Che would get you killed or disappeared, discussing his example of sacrifice, his selflessness, his humanity, his social conscience, his sense of justice, his international solidarity, his ideas of fair trade, etc. To them, these eternal yet modern beliefs, in a world of corruption, self-interest, and greed, are to be revered.’

When Ann Wright was recently asked to translate a book by Argentine painter Ciro Bustos dealing with some of the events surrounding Che Guevara’s guerrilla movement in Bolivia she persuaded herself that she needed to research the vegetation, terrain, topography in order to describe it better in the book. It was a place she’d long wanted to visit. Click here to read her account of the trip.

4. Route news feeds

We regularly post news items and related content through social network sites. Follow us to stay in touch.

twitter.com/Route_News
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www.facebook.com/Routebook

In Made in Bradford, novelist and sociologist M Y Alam presented research illustrating how stereotypes of young British Pakistani men found in the media, policy rhetoric and popular discourse differed from real life. In The Invisible Village, he continues his research across West Yorkshire, one of the most culturally diverse regions in Britain, and assesses whether similar misrepresentations apply to a much broader sample of the population.

The Invisible Village paints a vivid picture of everyday life in modern urban society with a series of insights and views of the world that may help us all make greater sense of it. Presenting stories drawn from conversations with people who talk openly and in moving terms about family, education, work, crime, migration, as well as home and belonging, this book allows us to look beyond the headlines.

Availble in paperback and for Kindle.

Click here for more details.

ROUTE IRISH is a fast-paced conspiracy thriller that delivers a fresh insight into the moral and political corruption at play in Iraq. As well as exploring the actions of private security firms on the ground in Iraq, Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty examine the effects of combat on security contractors – the new ‘soldiers’ of modern warfare – who witness the horrors of combat and are subject to post-combat stress yet receive little support from the state upon return home.

The book of the film features the full screenplay, an introduction from Paul Laverty, the backstory for principle characters Fergus and Frankie, production notes and photographs from the film, plus three key background essays that provide extended context to the film:

Aftermath by Mark Townsend looks at the legacy of the war in the minds of returning British soldiers and the serious consequences for our own communities with the ticking time bomb of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Private Security Contractors in Iraq: the lifeline of neo-colonial rule by Haifa Zangana illustrates the how the occupation of Iraq continues its brutality in increasingly private hands.

Justice for Iraq by Mike Phipps calls for justice for a country ravaged by war and occupation in the face of a political establishment with a will for collective amnesia.

Route Irish is available in paperback and for Kindle. Click here for more details and to order.

Ken Loach will be signing copies of the book at Watertstones, Liverpool, on Monday 7 March, 2pm. Click here for details.

News

Submission Guidelines: We’re looking for Yorkshire’s next great novelist plus mentoring opportunity for 18-30 year old aspiring publisher. - Details.
Ian Clayton: Talk at Waterstone’s Doncaster on World Book Night. – Details
Some Girls Mothers: Workshop and event at Huddersfield Literature Festival on 17 March. - Details.
Mark Gwynne Jones and Psychicbread: Events in London and Portsmouth. – Details

For anyone lucky enough to presented with a shiny new book reading toy, a selection of Route books are available on Kindle. These books are perfect food for your new machine, whether that’s a Kindle itself, or via the Kindle app on an iPad, iPhone, Android Phone, PC or Mac.

As a very special Christmas offer The Route Book at Bedtime is just £3.44.
‘Adult bedtime books don’t come much better than this.’

Click here to order and try your new device out under the covers.

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Direct link to other Route titles

The Train of Ice and Fire – Ramon Chao
‘For Manu’s growing army of admirers, the book provides a magical-realist insight into how his music has developed.’ – The Guardian

Away From the Light of Day – Amadou and Mariam
‘I don’t think there’s ever been a band from Africa with whom people have engaged in quite such a way.’ – Damon Albarn

La Rochelle – A Novel – Michael Nath
‘Original, funny and absolutely spot-on.’ – The Independent

Some Girls’ Mothers
‘Wonderful voices, fabulous women.’ – Staple Magazine

Ideas Above Our Station
‘A diverting travelling companion.’ – The Guardian

Born in the 1980s
‘If you are twentysomething and want to show your feelings instead of telling them, or not twentysomething and just want to learn something about the “next wave”, this is the book for you.’ – Bloomsbury Review

More books can be found on our website www.route-online.com

Happy new year to you. Looking forward to some great new books in 2011.

‘The most interesting and vibrant publishing house around today.’ – Nottingham Evening Post

For Music Lovers

Bringing It All Back Home by Ian Clayton
A personal journey through life with music
‘One of the best books about popular music ever written.’ – Record Collector
£5.99

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The Train of Ice and Fire by Ramon Chao
Chronical of an infamous rock n roll tour through Colombia
‘A fabulous account of a wonderfully borderline-insane trip.’ – Songlines
£5.99

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Away From the Light of Day by Amadou and Mariam
Autobiography of Africa’s most loved duo.
‘I don’t think there’s ever been a band from Africa with whom people have engaged in quite such a way.’ – Damon Albarn
£5.99

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For Story Lovers

The Route Book at Bedtime
Bedtime story collection for adults.
‘Adult bedtime books don’t come much better than this.’ – The Big Issue
£4.99

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Some Girls’ Mothers
Six stories about mothers and daughters
‘Touching, wounding and humbling.’ – Simon Armitage
£4.99

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Born in the 1980s
Coming of age stories for twentysomethings
‘Captures the spirit of a generation up and coming.‘ – The Bloomsbury Review
£4.99

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For Lovers of a Damn Good Read

La Rochelle by Michael Nath
Original debut novel that spins round a love triangle.
‘Original, funny and absolutely spot-on.’ – The Independent
£4.99

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All the above books are also available for Kindle. Follow links on the individual book page.

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Click here for Route’s full list of book titles.

We wish you all a happy holiday.

WATERSTONE’S PICCADILLY, LONDON
Monday, 17 May 2010, 7:00PM
Tickets £3, redeemable against purchase of the book on the evening

Further details: 0207 851 2400

For an advance preview of book, click here

‘DO YOU HAVE A HANDKERCHIEF was the question my mother asked me every morning, standing by the gate to our house, before I went out onto the street. I didn’t have a handkerchief. And because I didn’t, I would go back inside and get one. I never had a handkerchief because I would always wait for her question. The handkerchief was proof that my mother was looking after me in the morning. For the rest of the day I was on my own.’

In Every Word Knows Something of a Vicious Circle Herta Müller describes how living under a dictatorship shapes her work. She outlines how words and writing allowed her to turn humiliation into a type of dignity that takes time to arouse suspicion.

Click here for more.