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The Nature Writing Prize for Working Class Writers returns for its fifth year, offering one year’s free membership to Campaign for National Parks, a £300 paid commission to write a National Parks-inspired piece for Viewpoint Magazine and an Arvon course of choice.
The winner will also receive three one-hour mentoring sessions with a Gaia commissioner, a one-hour mentoring session with a literary agent and a book bundle from Octopus Publishing Group.
The prize, which aims to break down barriers, was set up in 2020 by the writer Natasha Carthew to create opportunity for working-class nature writers of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. It is supported by Arvon Foundation, the Campaign for National Parks and Gaia, an imprint of Octopus Publishing Group. The prize is free to enter and encourages self-identifying working-class writers from all over the UK, whether they live in the country or in towns, cities and other spaces.
In the 1970s, science fiction writer JG Ballard was intrigued by the growing capabilities of computers – so used one to compose poems. They were a first step on the road to ChatGPT.
The novelist and short story writer JG Ballard, is known for conjuring warped and reimagined versions of the world he occupied. Dealing with strange exaggerations of realities and often detailing the breakdown of social norms, his unconventional works are hard to categorise.
Sitting on the edge of reality, these unsettling visions often provoked controversy. Eschewing a science-fiction of the distant future, Ballard described his own work as being set in "a kind of visionary present".
Today, as we contemplate generative AI writing texts, composing music and creating art, Ballard's visionary present yet again has something prescient and fresh to tell us.
In an interview from 2004, the author Vanora Bennett suggested to Ballard that he writes about "what is just about to happen in a given community". Asked about what "kind of real-life event" inspired the ideas in his fiction Ballard responded:
I just have a feeling in my bones: there's something odd going on, and I explore that by writing a novel, by trying to find the unconscious logic that runs below the surface and looking for the hidden wiring. It's as if there are all these strange lights, and I'm looking for the wiring and the fuse box.
The topics in Ballard's fiction frequently reveal just how highly attuned he was to the subtleties of the emerging technological and social shifts that were, as he puts it, just below the surface. The fuse box of society was often rewired in his ideas.
And with generative AI there is undoubtedly something odd going on, to which Ballard's attention seems to have been drawn long before it even happened.
The number of UK audiobook downloads increased by 17% between 2022 and 2023, according to new data from the Publishers Association (PA).
Revenue from audiobooks rose 24% across the same period to £206m in 2023, reflecting an increase in the number of audiobook downloads from 50m to 59m, the trade body said.
Over five years, UK audiobook revenue has more than doubled. “It’s fair to say that audio is now a really serious part of the publishing portfolio,” said the PA’s chief executive, Dan Conway. “Audiobooks have established themselves as a major route to market for consumers of books in this country”.
These figures reflect the way the audiobook market has evolved. Spotify made audiobooks available to its Premium subscribers in October, while Audible has expanded from single-narrator audiobooks to those with large, starry casts and sound effects. Sam Mendes-produced audiobooks of David Copperfield and Oliver Twist featuring Ncuti Gatwa, Helena Bonham Carter and Nicola Coughlan were released in the past two years, and there are plans to release new audiobooks of all seven Harry Potter titles, voiced by a cast of more than 100 performers.
The bursting of the pandemic sales bubble has been sharp and painful for sectors such as online retail. In publishing, an unlikely source — social media — has helped avoid a hard landing.
Social media should, in theory, be an enemy of the publishing industry given the competing pressures on consumers’ time. Since the pandemic, though, it has produced growth for once-niche genres such as fantasy and propelled authors who were little known to mainstream audiences on to bestseller lists. This will not be a fleeting phenomenon.
BookTok is a community within the video app TikTok in which influencers post content such as reviews of their favourite books. Similar groups can be found on YouTube or Instagram. Yet it is BookTok that has shaken up the sometimes fusty literary world, turbocharging sales of authors such as Sarah J Maas, Colleen Hoover and Alice Oseman among younger readers.
Articles
On this edition of Working Overtime, hosts Isaac Butler and June Thomas reply to a listener who wants some advice on pitching fiction to literary magazines. For help, Isaac and June turn to J. Robert Lennon, a novelist and short story writer who is also the editor of EPOCH, the literary magazine associated with Cornell University. In the interview, Lennon describes the pitching process for EPOCH and explains what he and his colleagues are looking for when they review submissions. He also offers advice to anyone who might be considering pitching their fiction.
In the latest “Craftwork” episode, Declan Meade talks with Brad about starting and editing a literary magazine. He is the founding editor and publisher of The Stinging Fly, one of the world’s premiere literary magazines, based in Dublin, Ireland. You may have read about Declan and The Stinging Fly in the New York Times back in April 2023, in a feature story by Max Ufberg.
Brad Listi: What about for people listening who might want to submit, but also people who might have an interest in starting their own magazine? I’d be interested to hear you talk about the editorial process when somebody gets a yes, and what in general the editorial process entails at the Stinging Fly. I have to believe that it’s lovely to get a story where you feel like it’s almost all done. And usually I think when a writer is in command of the work, there usually isn’t a ton to do. But are there instances where the work is like 75 percent of the way there, and in the editorial process you get the rest of the way? What does it look like for somebody who gets a yes to work with you in an editorial capacity?
“Thomas Pynchon is a young writer, just twenty, who has previously published fiction in Epoch. He is a Cornell graduate and now lives in Seattle.”
Writers know that the time between when a piece is accepted by a literary magazine and when it is actually published can be rather protracted—my longest span was three years—and by the time Thomas Pynchon appeared in the Spring 1960 issue of The Kenyon Review, he was a still-young 23. He’d just graduated from Cornell, his time there split by a stint in the Navy. He worked for Boeing in Seattle—writing for Bomarc Service News, an internal newsletter.
Although tasked with writing technical pieces about anti-aircraft missiles, Pynchon was characteristically wry. In “The Mad Hatter and the Mercury Wetted Relays,” Pynchon informs readers that Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter had gone mad from “chronic mercurialism” or “hatter’s shakes,” which could affect Boeing workers if certain wire-wrapped glass capsules explode. “When dealing with mercury,” Pynchon warns, “even in small amounts, respect it and play it safe. Don’t become a ‘Mad Hatter,’ you might find it to be much more unpleasant than attending a mad tea party.”
The same jaunty rhythms mark “Entropy,” Pynchon’s story in The Kenyon Review. Although he would later dismiss the piece as an example of “overwriting,” something “too conceptual, too cute and remote,” the story is playfully chaotic—the type of glorious excess for which literary magazines are made.
At CNN, Leah Asmelash laments the demise of many “long-standing” literary magazines. “The Believer,” she writes, which was started in 2003, “was once at the top of the literary magazine game. A leading journal of art and culture, the Believer published the work of icons like Leslie Jamison, Nick Hornby and Anne Carson. It won awards, it launched careers.” But the University of Nevada, which has housed the magazine since 2017, announced that it was shutting it down: “In a statement explaining the decision, the dean of the school’s College of Liberal Arts called print publications like the Believer ‘a financially challenging endeavor.’”
Oh, boy. Leslie Jamison, an icon? The Believer, a publication that “launched careers”? The only thing missing here is some theme music and a “CNN exclusive” or two.
Asmelash goes on to write about a handful of literary magazines housed at universities with MFA programs that are also shutting down — the Alaska Quarterly Review and the Sycamore Review, among others. We get the predictable “It wasn’t always this way” about halfway through:
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