Evie Wyld wins the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize

Thrilled to see that Evie Wyld has won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for her debut novel, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice. The prize is awarded annually for the best work of literature by a Commonwealth writer aged 35 or under, written in English and published in the UK.

She's following in the steps of some wonderful writers. One of my favourite authors, Elizabeth Jane Howard, won in 1952 for her debut novel The Beautiful Visit, and other winners have included V.S.Naipul, Margaret Drabble, A.N.Wilson (twice) & David Hare.

The prize was set up in 1942 by Jane Oliver in memory of her husband John Llewellyn Rhys, a young author who was killed on 5 August 1940 while serving as a bomber pilot in the Royal Air Force.

I wrote about Evie's book on LLG, a few months ago after attending her US launch party. It's an extraordinary piece of fiction, about which I think often. Set in Eastern Australia, it's the more remarkable for being a story written about men, their behaviour and the emotions they can't express. Dealing with the mental inheritance of war through three generations, her voice is quietly confident, compassionate and wholly convincing, transporting the reader into an uncomfortable, edgy world that holds one rapt. I highly recommend it.

www.eviewyld.com

Buy it in the UK here & in the US here

London here I come...

I’m feeling rather sad at the thought of leaving New Jersey. It’s been wonderful getting to spend proper time with J& Y, and with les Bassets, and I shall miss them very much. And what am I going to do without those silky Basset ears to play with?

After my stressful bolt around Manhattan yesterday, we have had a calm evening, eating Y’s delicious homemade cauliflower au gratin off our laps, and watching the Star Trek movie (a second time for both J & me; we were just geeking out by watching it again), teaching Y how to do the Vulcan hand salute & eating Magnolia’s chocolate devil’s food cake.

J remarked that I seemed quietly excited about my trip back to England and he was right…sort of. It’s always lovely to see family, friends and dogs, but I don’t really want to be in England right now, not one bit. But my mother is feeling mis & I think we both need to regroup.

So I’m sugar coating the pill by arranging lovely things to do instead. The basic plan is that I will spend the weeks writing & clearing attics with my mother at the family home in the countryside near Banbury, and the weekends in London, until I return to NYC at the beginning of January.

Highlights so far include a Tweetup in London this weekend with various of my blog & Twitter acquaintance, seeing New Moon with my best friend Miss P, and the prospect of dinner & a stay at the new Dean Street Townhouse hotel from the Soho House stable, which opens next week. There's also a chance I may get to see the wonderful Tania Kindersley as we serendipitously find ourselves in the same part of the world. (Tania lives in Scotland and I in America, so this is luck indeed.)

Whilst I am on the subject of Tania, her & Sarah Vine's most excellent book Backwards in High Heels
would be the perfect Christmas present for intelligent and loved girlfriends. Read about it here & buy it here(It's out in America in the New Year.)

Friday Giveway: Fifty Dresses that Changed the World

I can't remember a series of books that spoke to my overarching obsessions more clearly. You only have to look at the covers to see what I mean. There in all their glory are four icons of the design world: a Givenchy dress, a Verner Panton chair, a Jaguar E-Type and a Jimmy Choo sandal.

Drool.

Fifty Dresses That Changed the World, Fifty Chairs That Changed the World Fifty Cars That Changed the World,and Fifty Shoes That Changed the World aren't those awful stocking fillers you see every year, each containing a badly edited list that makes anyone with a modicum of knowledge spit their cocoa across the room in horror.

These neat hardbacks are produced by the UK's Design Museum, and have the weight of authoritative research behind them. The books attempt to catalogue the pieces that have made the most substantial impact in their area of design, with each entry giving a short appraisal of the item's iconic status.

Whilst I may not agree with all the entries, the whole is a fascinating window into both design and social history. And at just £12.99, they'd make great presents, even for grumpy know-it-alls like myself.

Now: the exciting bit. Because I loved them so much, I persuaded the lovely people at Octopus to give me a stack of these wonderful books, and I'm going to give them away to LLG readers three copies of one title at a time. Today I'm giving away THREE COPIES OF FIFTY DRESSES THAT CHANGED THE WORLD, so that three people can drool over the 1915 Delphos Pleated dress, Hussein Chalayan's 2007 LED creation and the rest,

Simply leave me a comment telling me about your favourite dress, and I'll randomly pick a winner on Wednesday next week.
(This is a UK-delivery only competition I am afraid. Of course that is not so say you can't enter if you live anywhere else, but the books can only be sent to UK addresses)

The Original Leon Superfood Salad from the Leon cookbook

Leon is probably the best place in London to find a healthy, inexpensive and outrageously scrumptious lunch that can be eaten on the hoof, in a nearby park or at your desk. For three months, whilst I was fashion editing on a magazine based near Leon's original Carnaby Street outlet, I ate the Original Superfood Salad at least three times a week. It's that good.

One of only two dishes to have been on the restaurant's menu since the beginning, it is packed full of nutritious deliciousness. Although it tastes green & summery, it feels especially good in the autumn and winter for warding off the lurgies.

Before the restaurant published its first cookbook, I messed about at home with approximations to it, but I always seemed to overcook the broccoli, forget an ingredient or two and I hadn't got the dressing proportions correct.

So, imagine my glee when chef Allegra McEvedy, one of the founders, put together the official Leon cookbook, sensibly dividing it into a front half dealing with the importance of ingredients, and the back half packed with wonderful, simple Leon & Leon-inspired recipes.

The Original Leon Superfood Salad (Serves two)

2 tbsp quinoa
Salt and pepper
2-3 broccoli spears, cut into bite-sized florets, stalks sliced
120g frozen peas
Quarter cucumber, peeled,cut into slim batons
100g good-quality feta cheese, crumbled
1 handful of alfalfa sprouts
2 tbsp toasted seeds such as pumpkin, sesame and sunflower
½ avocado, cut into pieces
1 small handful of flat-leaf parsley, chopped
1 small handful of mint, chopped
2 dsp lemon juice
4 dsp extra-virgin olive oil

Put the quinoa into a small pan. Cover with cold water to a couple of centimetres/one inch above the grain and let it gently simmer over a low heat until the water has evaporated — this takes about 15 minutes — then cool to room temperature.

Pour a couple of cms/one inch of hot water into another saucepan, add a pinch of salt. Bring it to the boil, drop in the broccoli & peas, cover and boil for 3 minutes. Drain and run under cold water to take all the heat out and keep the broccoli good and green.

Now build your salad in layers: broccoli, peas, cucumber, feta, alfalfa sprouts, seeds, avocado, quinoa and finally the herbs. Only dress it with the lemon juice, oil and seasoning just before you eat it.

I would add here that I don’t usually weigh out any of the ingredients for this salad, being a) too lazy and b) preferring not to have chunks of excess avocado going brown in the fridge. Although I have made it correctly so I know how it’s supposed to look & taste, for me the beauty of it is that so long as you keep the ingredients the same, the proportions of the individual quantities don’t seem to matter so much. Oh & I just toss it all together.



This is the bowlful of goodness I made for JK’s and my lunch today. I used an entire avocado as I knew I'd never get round to using the other half. Likewise, the cucumber: I had a small American ridge cucumber (about half the size of a European hothouse one), and peeled, de-seeded* and baton-ed it all. As we had missed breakfast, I doubled the quinoa content. Oh and I halved the dressing as we had run out of olive oil.

*the seeds are much bigger and quite bitter compared to UK cucumbers

Click here to buy Leon: Ingredients and Recipes

After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, by Evie Wyld

I've had a relatively quiet time here in Manhattan over the past fortnight. I've seen few of my friends, and have concentrated on writing, working & meetings.

That's not to say I haven't ventured out of my bed high classing working environment. My second night here coincided with the visit from London of dearest L, an old friend & roommate, literary agent & author who was here for the book launch uptown of one of her authors.



Evie Wyld is one of Granta’s New Voices of 2008 and the book, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, is her debut. Set in Eastern Australia, it's the more remarkable for being a story written about men, their behaviour and the emotions they can't express. Dealing with the mental inheritance of war through three generations, her voice is quietly confident, compassionate and wholly convincing, transporting the reader into an uncomfortable, edgy world that holds one rapt. I highly recommend it.

Available from US Amazon & UK Amazon

William Walker's First Year of Marriage: A Horror Story by Matt Rudd

I'm not going to lie by pretending that author & Sunday Times journalist Matt Rudd is a complete stranger to me, my sister or several close friends. Nor am I going to pretend that I didn't costume design his wife's (excellent) short film. Or that we didn't once work together on a British magazine.

The reason I'm getting all that out of the way is because I'd like to suggest that you all rush off to buy Matt's new book: William Walker's First Year of Marriage: A Horror Story which is published in the UK today, but several of you lovely readers know full well that Matt & I have been friends since, oh Christ, maybe 1999, and may suspect that I am merely plugging his book as an act of friendship.


Fortunately, my code of ethics remains intact in this case, as Matt is, and always has been one of the funniest writers I know. I still remember reading his first short stories about travelling in bizarre and, at the time, off the beaten track places and hooting with laughter. In fact, I believe I may even have got him to sign my copy of some obscure paperback publication that featured his first published stories. (Matt, I'm fully expecting to educate my future children off the proceeds of that in years to come.)

I read the first draft of William Walker's First Year of Marriage: A Horror Story quite some time ago, and loved it, although did feel duty bound to check with his wife H that the vignettes within were products of Matt's fertile imagination and not recounts of actual happenings after they got married.

Matt is on Twitter here (although he claims to Tweet only under duress from his publishers), and you can read his columns from The Sunday Times here. And, of course, buy William Walker's First Year of Marriage: A Horror Story it by clicking on the book title in this post.

Tout Sweet: Hanging Up My High Heels for a New Life in Rural France

Dearest M, who I visited recently in Lausanne, has spent much of her life with her wonderful Paris-based father at his restored farmhouse, deep in the Vienne, just south of Tours & the Loire Valley.

The first time I visited was when I was desperate to get out of London to write. They lent me a little (& rather unrestored) house in the nearby village in which to stay for the summer.

I drove down singlehanded from London via Calais on an epic trip which started at 9am and ended at 2am in a tiny lane in a ravishing medieval village whilst I crashed around with torch and signal-free mobile. The next morning I discovered that, since last visited, it had also become home to some invisible red biting spiders, (I knew they were there as there was a note on the door,) so I relocated to a rented fairy tale apartment carved out of the walls of the village's ruined castle, complete with oak stairs and creeper clad leaded windows.

Over the summer I fell deeply in love with the village and with the Vienne. I was a constant source of curiosity to the villagers, who were all friendly & charming as I battled through with my schoolgirl French (no one speaks English there). My boyfriend came out for a fortnight and we hurtled around wine tasting, shopping in the markets, eating like pigs and even visiting the Futuroscope theme park in Poitiers, (my advice would be: don't).

I last visited for M&P's beautiful country wedding and, although I have an open invitation to return (& I need to meet the cat that her father has named after me), it's not so easy to get to from Manhattan. Then, out of the blue, the next best thing happened.

Tout Sweet: Hanging Up My High Heels for a New Life in Rural France
by ex fashion editor Karen Wheeler arrived from Europe. She thought I might enjoy it because of the similarities in our professional lives, but, in the smallest of small worlds, Ms Wheeler's part of rural France just happens to be a mere 30 miles from my small piece of French heaven.

I gulped it down in a day, recognising the area from her vivid descriptions, & snorting with laughter and with agreement, as she nailed the experience of being a single Englishwoman in a small provincial French village

There are obvious parallels to be drawn between Ms Wheeler's life and my own. We've both been fashion editors & writers on glossy mags & on newspapers. We both upsticked from our shiny London merry-go-round to live in different countries on a whim. And we've both gone from frenetic dashing around in heels to launches & events to pottering around the countryside with dogs and taking pleasure in a slower pace of life. (Although, granted, I'm only in the country for the summer, but I have no intention of going back into full-time, soul-destroying magazine work.)

Ms Wheeler & I have never met (although I do feel we should have) but I feel nothing but empathy for a woman who, on the first day of renovating her new French cottage discovers that she has no suitable clothes for construction work after years in the fashion industry, and sets off for the day in gold sandals.


Released on July 6th, it's already in Amazon's Top 100 Travel Books and you can buy it Tout Sweet: Hanging Up My High Heels for a New Life in Rural France by clicking on the book title anywhere in this post. She has a great blog too at www.toutsweet.net and Twitters at @mimipompom1

Book of the day: Chastened: No More Sex in the City

Released this week in the United Kingdom, I think Chastened: No More Sex in the City
by literary critic & journalist Hephzibah Anderson would be a great addition to any bedside pile of reading material. (And that's not just because she's a friend.)

The book is a memoir, covering the year that she decided to give up on sex voluntarily and explore what it really means to be chaste in a sex fulled world. Her twelve months of dates, temptation, frustration - and excuses is chronicled in her intelligent, witty voice, and her writing never fails to engage.

She wrote about some of the experiences of writing Chastened in The Guardian here. You can buy Chastened: No More Sex in the City
at a greatly reduced launch price by clicking on the book title in this post. It comes out in America next Spring, published by Viking.

Four great food books

Lying in bed the night before I moved out of the East Village apartment, I glanced over at my left hand bedside table (nightstand), and was suddenly struck by the titles piled up there. No devotional reading, light bedtime novels, or volumes of bien pensees for me. No, I had a stack of books about food.

Since I discovered the cookery book section at Strand, my book spending habits have been out of control. Since Union Square is on the way to just about everything, I convince myself at least twice weekly that Strand, just a couple of blocks south, is equally en route.

Just a leeetle look, I mumble to myself, already pushing through the doors.

Thing is, not only do they seem to stock just about everything (Strand buys thousands of books every day, so the stock is continually changing), they also have great discounts on list prices (often cheaper than Amazon) and, in addition to the largest rare books collection in New York City, they also buy/sell secondhand books so there are treasures to be unearthed.

And, of course, I'm all about supporting independent book stores. Yup, that's why I spend so much money in Strand. Nothing to do with my verging on uncontrollable book addiction.

That pile next to my bed:
Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin Careme, the First Celebrity Chef by Ian Kelly.: Tales Near the Runway gave me this when she stayed over for last season's NYFW. Wonderful insight into the beginnings of the cult of the chef in the 18th & 19th centuries.

American Food Writing: An Anthology: With Classic Recipes by Molly O'Neill. At $40 I lusted after this book for months, stroking its covers and dipping into the essays whilst lurking in Strand's corners, before finally giving in. From Meriwether Lewis's pioneer treks across the country to Michael Pollan's food missionary zeal, this book runs the gamut of the American way of eating. Extraordinary.

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution by Thomas McNamee. Extremely thorough & fascinating biography of a curiously unlikeable woman, which illustrates how this visionary overruled normal boundaries of common sense, politesse and feasibility to achieve her ends.

Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink by David Remnick. Ranging across memoirs, short stories, poems and essays from the life span of The New Yorker, this is a wonderful dip-in anthology from writers from all fields.(M.F.K. Fisher, Roald Dahl, Julian Barnes, Joseph Mitchell, Calvin Trillin & Adam Gopnik all make an appearance.)

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Four or five years ago I was browsing in blissful Daunt Books in Belsize Park when a wonderfully designed plain grey book cover caught my eye. It was a copy of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson. This was the beginning of my love affair with Persephone Books, a privately owned imprint based in London’s Bloomsbury. They specialise in re-discovering out of print and forgotten classics by (mostly) women authors from the twentieth century, ranging from novels to cook books, memoirs to travel.

Published in 1938, and set a few years earlier, Miss Pettigrew fits into the genre of gorgeously romantic, often bittersweet, beautifully written period literature that includes Nancy Mitford & Georgette Heyer’s entire oeuvre and The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

The movie of the book opens here this week, and I attended a preview screening this evening. The casting is excellent,(Amy Adams is perfection as the ditzy co-lead, nightclub singer Delysia Lafosse) the set design ravishing, the costumes fabulous, but the cinematography is gloomy and the simplicity and charming heart of the book has been replaced by rather too much moralising and some shocking liberties with the plot that don’t really stand up to much scrutiny.

Still, it’s enjoyable and lovely to look at, even if the trailer cherry picked all the good moments.

Slamming

I don’t normally use this blog to flag events, (Do I look like Time Out?), but London’s Book Slam, hosted by the ebullient Mr Patrick Neate, in my ever so humble (wring hands) opinion, is probably the best literary night in the world (hyperbole? Me, never). I first pottered along to Cherry Jam some years ago when my fabulous friend Lana Citron was reading from her new novel, and stayed to be shock & awed by Patrick Neate’s poetry, some very good folk music and more readings.

Now it’s become so popular it’s moved from Cherry Jam to a nightclub, Neighbourhood, off Portobello, and has got all shiny and grown up with a swishy looking website, an oh-so-popular podcast and literary & musical names to make you swoon, (Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers, Adele, Nick Hornby, & Kate Nash amongst others.)

Next Thursday, the 28th February

This month they will be celebrating the advent of an eerily early spring in the company of cultural correspondents including (in Patrick Neate's own words): -
JULIAN GOUGH, author of the hilarious and plain brilliant 'Jude: Level 1' and winner of the National Short Story Prize, no less. He's flying in from Berlin.
ZUBZ, one of African hip hop's most innovative wordsmiths, jetting in from Jo'burg.
JAMES YUILL, a singer-songwriter at the forefront of new folk. He sings, he writes songs, and he rights wrongs. He'll taxi it cross town.
SALENA GODDEN,punk princess, poetess and high priestess of exorcising excess. She's also the author of the forthcoming 'Springfield Road' and she may be on rollerskates.
Plus, back from a bout at her majesty's leisure (he's a taster), DJ ILS.

Coincidences & connections

What a week. Apart from sweltering in the heat (although I have been told countless times that I am experiencing a delightful New York spring, and that when summer comes then I’ll reminisce fondly about the mild weather back in May), I have been glued to my keyboard during the day, and managing to drink my bodyweight in vodka in the evenings.

I finished David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten, a first novel so brilliant I despair of ever writing anything so interesting, elegiac, evocative and just so damn good. It deals with coincidences and passing connections across the world. It was an apt book to read here: my life in New York consists of a chain of my own (rather more banal) coincidences & connections.

On Thursday JSL asked me to join him & Elizabeth Wurtzel for supper at Fish, in the West Village. Elizabeth is now studying for a JD at Yale School of Law and is in New York for the summer as an associate at an NY law firm. She’s both fiercely intelligent and very attractive. By happenstance alone, sitting at the next table were three of my NY English friends, (including T, a model so gorgeous that men’s jaws drop when she walks by).

Other connections this week: P, the sexy boy I met at A&A’s wedding emailed to say that he had stumbled across this blog through Google; another reminder that any person one mentions on a blog will eventually read your comments. Good thing I was (rightly) very complimentary about him. Elizabeth wrote this cogent & timely piece in the Wall Street Journal on the implications of speaking one's mind about other people's characters on-line.

On Saturday I had a blind date with M, a photographer whom I met on line. We discovered that not only does he shoot for the magazine for which I was an editor for five years, but that I had actually produced several of his US based stories back in 2000.

We met for coffee for a couple of hours at The Bean. It’s the first date I've been on where I was equally dating the datee’s dog, but I think I passed muster with the dog. I had got off to a bad start in an email complaining about minute, over-pampered dogs in Manhattan, expecting that one day I would accidentally impale one on a stiletto whilst marching down Madison. He then mentioned his Chihuahua. He's not my type, but he’s great company, and we hatched a plan for a story driving a Bentley on an iconic drive in the US (Bentley have offered me any of their cars to drive/write about if I have a suitable travel story in the US).