So the bookies’ favourite has won it – Hilary Mantel’s  Wolf Hall

My own favourite for the prize was  Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room. It is set in the past, to be sure, but it engages with events in living memory, the consequences of  which are still very much with us, and would have been a most appropriate winner on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

All credit to Radio 4 for adapting Thomas Hardy’s unjustly neglected novel Two on a Tower

 
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Last night I went to the launch of Margaret Atwood’s latest novel, The Year of the Flood, at St James’s Church, Piccadilly. As Alexandra Pringle, Atwood’s editor at Bloomsbury, explained at the outset, it was not so much a conventional reading as “a whole new way to launch a book – a literary performance with original music”, and part of a three-month world tour covering  cover six countries: the UK, the US, Canada, Holland, Germany and Austria.

 
Atwood’s novel, a successor to Oryx and Crake, is a post-climate change dystopia set in the near future after a mysterious plague – the  “dry flood” of the title – has wiped out most of the human race.  On a ravaged planet populated by genetically modified animals such as rabbits that glow in the dark and silk-producing spider-goats, an eco-religious group called God’s Gardeners – whose commandments forbid them from eating “anything with a face” unless they’re “very, very hungry” – grow food crops on the tops of tower blocks. 

I am delighted to welcome as our guest blogger Pietro Grossi, one of Italy's most highly acclaimed young writers. Fists, his collection of three stories about young men undergoing rites of passage, has recently been  published  by Pushkin Press in a translation by Howard Curtis. Born in Florence in 1978, Pietro Grossi  is a great admirer of Hemingway and JD Salinger, and has been writing since he was eight years old. He lives and works between Tuscany and Milan, and will be appearing  at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Sunday 30 August.

In two days I'll be taking a plane to Scotland, and since yesterday evening I can't stop thinking about Nick Hornby. I was in Florence yesterday evening, at the stadium. The stadium is named after Artemio Franchi and was built during fascism: if you look it from the sky, it has the shape of the letter "D" for Duce. Artemio Franchi was an important figure in Italian soccer who died in 1983. Siena's  stadium is also named after him, but Florentine people don't like this very much.

Blackburn’s memoir of a dysfunctional bohemian upbringing was a fitting choice for a prize founded in memory of the writer JR Ackerley, a WWI veteran and friend of Forster and Isherwood. His own classic autobiography, My Father and Myself, begins provocatively: "I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919." According to an aunt, "Your father happened to have run out of French letters that day." 

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Alice Albinia has won the Dolman Best Travel Book Award for 2009 for her book Empires of the Indus. Her epic travelogue, which has already won a Somerset Maugham award and the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Foundation Special Prize for Non-Fiction, charts the history of the Indus river as Albinia travels along its 2,000-mile course through Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kashmir to its source in Chinese-occupied Tibet.

The sad death of Michael Jackson puts me in mind of his surprising cameo appearance in  Saul Bellow’s last novel, Ravelstein.   

 The narrator, Chick, is staying on the sixth floor of  the Hotel Crillon in Paris, and finds the whole of the floor beneath is occupied by Jackson and his entourage.

“The waiter tells me that Michael Jackson won’t eat the Crillon’s food,” his friend Ravelstein informs him. “His cook flies everywhere with him in the private jet. Anyway, the Crillon’s chef’s nose is out of joint. His cookery was good enough for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger…”

But reading is not an unchanging practice. As the Reading Experience Database 1450-1945  – an ambitious  project to record the way people have actually read in this country – makes clear, it has been practised in very different ways at different times and in different cultures.

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“Most people of my age, I know, reminisce about 10cc or the Stranglers or the Sex Pistols. Me, I don't really care what you think if I tell you that all I have to do to transport myself to the age of 14, and to the back bedroom of my parents' house in 1979, is to put on a crackly old record, and there is Teresa Stratas ..."

Private Eye’s Books and Bookmen took a pop at the Orange Prize recently, accusing it of ageism. “Only two novelists over 60 have won, the late Carol Shields and Rose Tremain last year.”  The column blames this “move over grandma” culture on the youth of the judging panels, pointing out that this year’s chairwoman, the broadcaster Fi Glover, is probably its most senior member at the ripe old age of 39. If they want to break this pattern, the Eye opined, they should give the award to the “classy contender” 66-year-old Marilynne Robinson.

I’ve been enjoying the new Thomas Pynchon novel, Inherent Vice. The most striking thing about is that if you had handed me the first 30 pages, I would have staked my life I was reading the opening of the new Elmore Leonard.
 

The lean, witty lines recounting the exploits of hippy private dick Doc Sportello  in Sixties LA (albeit with a nod to Raymond Chandler) absolutely smacks of Leonard and his humorous imagination (how about a crooked Jewish property developer with Nazi biker bodyguards?).

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The surprise winner of this year’s Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize is The Seventh Well, by Fred Wander. This short autobiographical novel drawing on the author’s concentration camp experiences beat Zoe Heller’s The Believers and Jackie Wullschlager’s feted biography of Chagall to win the prestigious award. Although The Seventh Well appeared in East Germany in 1971, it remained unknown in this country until it was published by Granta last year, in a superb English version by Michael Hoffman, the acclaimed poet and translator of Joseph Roth, Kafka and Brecht.

 “It is a work that combines considerable formal sophistication with great purity of expression,” said Will Skidelsky, chair of the judging panel. “By these means [it] achieves the feat of doing justice to the horrors of the Holocaust while foregrounding the humanity of its victims … Our excitement at discovering it was all the greater because so little was known about the book, or its author.”

It was a pleasure to be at the Authors’ Club lunch the other day, at which the guest of honour was Amanda Craig. She has just published her latest novel, Hearts and Minds, a work of positively Victorian ambition and sweep that explores the lives of immigrants and asylum-seekers who eke out a living on the fringes of prosperous middle-class Britain.

Craig spoke passionately about the issues explored in her new book,and went on to recall how she found herself embroiled in controversy back in 1996 when her biting satire on literary London, A Vicious Circle, was dropped by its publisher after a well-known critic decided that one of the less appealing characters was based on him, and threatened to sue, Only after she had remortgaged her house to pay a top libel lawyer to vet the book did the work appear, to considerable acclaim.