Warwick Prize for Writing- Relishing Complexity

A welcome addition to Literary Award World, The £50,000 Warwick Prize for Writing, has launched it's initial long list on the theme of Complexity and the list certainly lives up to it's focus.

The presiding academics tell us that the Warwick " is an innovative new literature prize that involves global competition, and crosses all disciplines"..... "The Prize will be given biennially for an excellent and substantial piece of writing in the English language, in any genre or form, on a theme which will change with every award. Who says Postmodernism is dead?

The winner of the inaugural Prize will be announced in February 2009. As well as the £50,000 the winner will get the opportunity to take up a short placement at The University of Warwick which lies on the border of Coventry and Warwickshire in the UK.

The prize has posed itself a number of intriguing questions. How does writing evolve? Where is its moving edge? Is all writing - at its very best - a type of creative writing?

Challenging and entirely appropriate questions for these interesting times. Tragic is inspired by the concept having been pondering the question himself in the face of some extraordinarily bland and formulaic literary award winners in recent times.

The long list is mostly delicious and the award has quickly staked a claim to be the best of breed making the generally eclectic Guardian First Book Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize look almost conservative and slightly dull, by comparison! As for the Man Booker, it is starting to look distinctly shallow.

Familiar titles

A number of books known to Tragic have made the list. Ian McDonald's , cyber-punkish quantum theory delight, Brasyl, is a hoot. It was the winner of the 2008 British Science Fiction Association's Best Novel .

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century by music critic Alex Ross, is rich and rewarding. Listen to the composers discussed as you read and it turns into a marvellous treat. It won the prestigious National Book Critics Award in USA in the criticism category.

The Wild Places from Robert Macfarlane is, in Tragic's view, an important and beautiful book; it was a 2008 winner of a Sundial Scottish Arts Council Award in the Non-fiction category. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein is both pertinent and as well put together as any of Ms. Klein's works. Tragic is a fan.

Given the criteria, the choice of Joseph O' Neil's over rated Netherlands on the list is a tad disappointing. Tragic agrees with Zadie Smith's conclusions in her excellent piece, 'Two Paths for the Novel' in the New York Review of Books which compares Netherland with Remainder by Necronautic Tom McCarthy.

Despite his love of cricket, Tragic found Joseph O' Neil's book disappointing, symptomatic in some respects of an age and line of questioning that has lost it's sheen. The book just seems to run out of puff in the end despite some gorgeous prose from Mr. O' Neill. The drama of individual actors seems to almost belong to the 'me now' cult of the last century, even when the work at least tries to come to grips with the post September 11 world.

It would actually be interesting to know what Ms. Smith, who launched an acidic attack on Literary Award World earlier this year, thinks about the Warwick. -To quote from from TimesOnline .

“Most literary prizes are only nominally about literature,” reads a blog signed by her. “They are really about brand consolidation for beer companies, phone companies, coffee companies and even frozen food companies.”

Tragic empathises with the sentiment but beauty and meaning are still unearthed in unexpected places - even those sponsored by the corporate sector.

Tragic is looking forward to getting his hands on some of the works below, particularly John Hughes collection of essays, Someone Else, as Mr. Hughes is based in Sydney only a short way from Tragic's hide away. Stuart Kauffman's, Reinventing the Sacred, looks like it is worthy of review too.

The full list, which contains a number of tantalising translated works, is as follows:

Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800
Lisa Appignanesi

The Tiger That Isn't
Michael Blastland & Andrew Dilnot

Torques: Drafts 58-76
Rachel Blau Duplessis

Glister
John Burnside

Planet of Slums
Mike Davis

The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi?
Francisco Goldman

Someone Else
John Hughes

Reinventing the Sacred
Stuart A Kauffman

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Naomi Klein

The Burning
Thomas Legendre

Adam's Ancestors: Race, Religion and the Politics of Human Origins
David Livingstone

The Wild Places
Robert Macfarlane

The Meaning of the 21st Century
James Martin

Brasyl
Ian McDonald

Netherland
Joseph O'Neill

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century
Alex Ross

The Informers
Juan Gabriel Vasquez (translator: Anne McLean)

Montano's Malady
Enrique Vila-Matas (translator: Jonathan Dunne)

Portrait with Keys
Ivan Vladislavic

The Trader, the Owner, the Slave
James Walvin