The Society of Authors - Awards

 

 

Recently I was fortunate enough to be invited to the prize giving bash of the Society of Authors, an organisation that exists to serve the interests of writers.  As an avid reader but many miles from being a professional writer, I did feel slightly like an interloper, but I am very glad I went.

As well as having the opportunity to see giants such as A.L. Kennedy and Philip Pullman in the flesh, the evening was a great chance to see writers in a kind of "home fixture".  The awards are presented for fiction, non-fiction and poetry and have categories by age of the writer, but what really separated them from the myriad other literary gongs was, for me, a sense of them being for writers, by writers.

 

I am sure that any recognition is welcome and rewarding for writers, but there must be something especially thrilling in being lauded by one's peers - others who really know what a tough job it is to actually get a whole damn book written down and out there.  A.L Kennedy, who presented the awards and gave an electrifying speech summed it up much better than I could hope to, and I won't attempt to paraphrase her, other than to say that she emphasised just how vital a job it is, to be able to evoke strong emotions in people you will never meet.  If you have spent years alone in a room forcing your ideas onto recalcitrant pages, I suspect you could never be told too often that you have made this connection.


I once saw a famous writer whose work I loved, sitting in a café, and agonised as to whether I should approach her and say how much her recent book had moved me, and made me see the world in a different way.  Would this seem creepy?  Intrusive?  Why on earth should she care what I think?  In the end I did so, and apologised for approaching her - she looked quizzical and asked why I would think she wouldn't want to hear such a positive reaction from a reader.  She may have just been being polite, of course, but I like to think that it was a good thing to do, to let them know that their work has really left a mark somewhere, in the heart of a total stranger.


Oh, and I also was alerted to "Idiopathy" by Sam Byers, an electric debut novel about thirty-something life that has had me actually laughing out loud, something that comic novels rarely do...