The browser: £50,000 university challenge will require a degree of complexity

Published on Friday 11 July 2008 16:44

It's tempting to think that there are just too many literary prizes. Between the Booker, the Costas, the Orange, the Nibbies, the IMPAC, the Theakston's, the Frank O'Connor, the Samuel Johnson, the Bollinger PG Wodehouse, the Guardian First Book, the BBC National Short Story, the James Tait Black, the Somerset Maugham, the TS Eliot and the Orwell Prizes, you'd think the bases were pretty much covered. Think again.

The University of Warwick is launching an award – with a whopping 50,000 prize. Its unique selling proposition? Excellence – in any genre or form, fiction or non-fiction, and a theme: this year, Complexity. The chair of judges is my old pal, Britain's coolest speculative fiction author, China Miville, above, who will be joined by a blogger and a maths professor (and two as yet undisclosed others). Anyone at the university can nominate a title. David Morley, the prize director, says: "The prize will help define where writing might be going; what new shapes and forms it may take; and even through what media it might be conducted – including electronic forms as well as the traditional book."

I can't think of a more intriguing concept for a prize, and await the long-list impatiently.

Golly goth: these are classics

It's a little early to be talking about Hallowe'en, but Penguin's new "gothic classics" deserve some advance praise. With Expressionist chartreuse and black covers they look the part, and alongside the obvious (Poe, Stoker, MR James) there are some real curiosities: William Hope Hodgson's The House On The Borderland, for example, and Lovecraft's queasy The Dunwich Horror.

Clocking in with Kafka and co

Academic hearts are a-flutter at the news that a large number of unpublished writings by Franz Kafka, in the possession of his friend's secretary, are going to be made available after an interminable (or "Kafkaesque" Every Other Paper) legal saga. If you can't wait, why not try Franz Kafka: The Office Writings, from Princeton University Press, collecting many of the "most interesting" cases he worked on in the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute? It could start a new trend: Walter Scott's legal thesis 'On the Disposal of the Bodies of Dead Criminals'; Anthony Trollope's proposals for the pillar-box; Philip Pullman's lesson plans; Irvine Welsh's internal memos for the Edinburgh Council Housing Department...

Who's for a literary lap-dance?

Pencil in August 14–17 for the inaugural West Port Festival in Edinburgh (yes, another festival). Taking in a stretch of the city that includes the National Library and lap-dancing bars, this is a smartly bohemian addition, with authors such as Ali Smith, inset, Andrew Drummond, Ian Rankin, above, and the Writers' Bloc Collective. The programme promises "poets with panache, novelists with tall tales, old hands and young upstarts, beguiling magicians, talented chess players, sardonic comics, dead people, Tunnock's, fancy dress, singular second-hand bookshops, whisky-scented pubs, crisp art spaces, mischief-makers and books". And it's only a daunder from the main festival in Charlotte Square.