A shortlist of twenty was selected from a total of 80 entries for this exciting competition and the winning story The Bear’s Necessities by Val Nolan was picked from three finalists. Val’s funny story, recounting a slightly nervous trip to Yosemite National Park in California, was published in The Telegraph Review and you can read it, along with the other two finalists’ stories Drawing Bugs Bunny in the Balkans by Richard Lakin and Cycling Across Iran by Charlie Walker, for yourself in The Daily Telegraph Review.

Oxfam’s third annual Bookfest , the UK’s largest book festival, is well and truly launched alongside the release of Oxfam’s annual top ten of most donated authors.

From 2 - 17 July, Bookfest is on!  Events are numerous and varied across Oxfam’s nationwide network of shops and specialist bookshops. Shops will hold author readings and book signings - including Louis de Bernieres, and MP Rory Stewart, one of the authors who contributed to Oxfam’s travel writing anthology OxTravels.

There will be book valuations and auctions, and quizzes - with one shop staging its very own version of ‘Just A Minute’. Another shop is teaming up with its local cinema to screen a series of literary adaptations, while another is hosting some of London’s top performance poets for a show which will be broadcast live on local radio. Local celebrities will also be popping into their local Oxfam shops, including an appearance by The Gruffalo.  There are talks on planes, local history, genealogy; competitions involving poetry, short-stories, ‘spot the Roald Dahl book’, bookmarks; local authors, poets and musicians are generously giving time and entertainment. In short, a feast of bookish events.

The launch coincides with the release of Oxfam’s annual top ten of most donated authors. The survey of Oxfam’s 685 shops and bookshops found that Dan Brown was the most donated author for the third year in a row, and was also one of the charity’s bestsellers. Ian Rankin again came in at number two, and Jeremy Clarkson’s books were the third most donated.

The Number One bestselling author this year is Stieg Larsson, on the back of the amazing success of the Millennium series - one place up from last year’s number two. New entry Sophie Kinsella’s books were the second most sold, illustrating the enduring popularity of chick lit, and Oxfam’s most donated author Dan Brown was the third best seller. Twilight author Stephenie Meyer was a non-mover at number 4, but this year shared her fourth position with Terry Pratchett.

Popular author Joanna Trollope, who is a new entry in the top ten best sellers list said: ‘I am very gratified to be one of Oxfam’s top sellers. Their bookshops are most impressive - for the careful condition of the books as well as for the huge range of titles. I am so pleased to think that sales of my books are helping to support the vital work that Oxfam does’.

Bookfest celebrates the central role that books play in people’s lives, and the impact that donating a book or buying a book from Oxfam can have on the lives of poor people around the world. Book sales have been helping Oxfam in its fight against poverty for more than fifty years.

The sale of just two books in an Oxfam shop is enough to pay for one day’s home-based care for a person living with HIV or AIDS in South Africa while the sale of three books could provide ten days’ worth of basic food rations for a family in an emergency situation.

]]> http://www.oxfam.org.uk/applications/blogs/books/?feed=rss2&p=3768 http://www.oxfam.org.uk/applications/blogs/books/?p=3758 http://www.oxfam.org.uk/applications/blogs/books/?p=3758#comments Mon, 04 Jul 2011 19:48:17 +0000 Susan Oldfield http://www.oxfam.org.uk/applications/blogs/books/?p=3758 Splendid news for all bookshops - in a recent sale of printed books and maps at Bonhams, a total of approximately £25,000 was raised by the sale of books donated to Oxfam bookshops.

Special mention goes to Aylesbury, whose 1572 Bible sold for £6,500, which we believe to be the highest price achieved in the whole auction of 709 lots. This “Holie Bible. Conteyning the Olde Testament and the Newe’”contains a remarkable version of the Psalms where the Great Bible’s and Bishops’ translations are printed in parallel, with woodcut historiated initials showing scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Other items included two autograph postcards signed “S. Sassoon” and “Siegfried Sassoon”, to V.W. Garratt, donated to the Herne Hill shop which sold for £2,600 as well as a copy (no 40 of 320 copies) of Memoirs of an Infantry Officer by Siegfried Sassoon from the St Ives bookshop in Cornwall, which sold for £1,000.
First editions of a copy of Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley poems from the  Nottingham shop and of a copy of J G Farrell’s Troubles ‘(the Lost Booker Prize winner, incidentally, donated to Canterbury) were sold for £3,500 and £950 respectively . Also donated to the Canterbury bookshop was a copy of Samuel Johnson’s Marmor Norfolciense which raised £1,200
A copy of Jeypore Enamels’ donated to the Moseley bookshop, Birmingham, included this wonderful illustration and raised £1,700.
Hampstead bookshop collected E T Richmond’s The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, again with beautiful illustrations and raised £1,400 and Swansea’s copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was sold for £850. Hackles for Fly Fishing from Newark was sold for £750.
All in all, a truly great result!  Thanks to our generous donors and keen-eyed shop staff.

]]> http://www.oxfam.org.uk/applications/blogs/books/?feed=rss2&p=3758 http://www.oxfam.org.uk/applications/blogs/books/?p=3752 http://www.oxfam.org.uk/applications/blogs/books/?p=3752#comments Mon, 27 Jun 2011 17:41:13 +0000 Susan Oldfield http://www.oxfam.org.uk/applications/blogs/books/?p=3752

Oxfam Bookfest 2011 is almost upon us – look out for special bookish events at your local Oxfam Bookshop during the two weeks 2-16 July. Thanks to our hardworking and creative shop staff, we’ve the most amazing range and selection of events this year: choose from bloodcurdling readings by crime writers, literary quizzes, walks’n’talks on local history and landscape, writing competitions – the lot! Simply go to our website and look for Oxfam bookshops in your area.

(http://www.oxfam.org.uk/shopFinder/ShopFinder.aspx?searchType=Event)

Here’s a great example of what’s on offer (and not actually in a bookshop – that’s how experimental we are!) - staff at Streatham Oxfam Furniture & Electrical in South London, are holding a book reading on 4 July, starting at 6.45pm. Novelist Louisa Young, author of the Lionboy series for young adults, will read from her new novel My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (recently “must read of the week” at Waterstones and glowingly reviewed in The Times and The Independent). Josa Young, another up-and-coming novelist from this talented family, will read from her book One Apple Tasted.

Aspiring writers or poets are also warmly invited to read extracts from their work. This event also coincides rather happily with Streatham Festival.

Tickets cost £5, including a visit to the snack table and first drink, and are on sale in-store.

Set on the Western Front, in London and in Paris, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You is a moving and brilliant novel of love, class and sex in wartime, and how war affects those left behind as well as those who fight. While Riley Purefoy and Peter Locke fight for their country, their survival and their sanity in the trenches of Flanders, Nadine Waveney, Julia Locke and Rose Locke do what they can at home. Beautiful, obsessive Julia and gentle, eccentric Peter are married: each day Julia goes through rituals to prepare for her beloved husband’s return. Nadine and Riley, only eighteen when the war starts, and with problems of their own already, want above all to make promises - but how can they when the future is not in their hands? And Rose? Well, what did happen to the traditionally brought-up women who lost all hope of marriage, because all the young men were dead?

‘The disillusionment, when hopes and dreams were so cruelly shattered in the mud of Flanders is beautifully chartered in this tender, elegiac novel. Louisa Young marshals her cast of young men and women with the utmost adroitness, capturing their innocence, courage and decency’ - The Independent

‘Powerful, sometimes shocking, boldly conceived, and irradiated by anger and pity’ - Sunday Times

Thus provided with so many new and exciting books Oxfam Bookfest 2011 is, therefore, destined to be even more brilliantly successful.  Bookfest takes place in July but you can already watch out for our Rainbow of Books display,  bringing a massive dose of colour to Oxfam shop windows around the country.  How was it created?  Graham at our bookbarn in Huddersfield sourced 600 donated books with covers in all the colours we needed (you remember - red, orange, yellow….etc.).  Jasper and Andy, in London, then built them into a gorgeous rainbow arc and artfully photographed it.  See the finished article in your local Oxfam shop or at Talking Books at the Oxfam website - there’s also a neat little video showing how the building was done.

Bookfest events for July are in preparation in many Oxfam Book Shops - use the handy eventfinder tool on the website to discover what’s going on in a bookshop near you.

Hay Festival hosted an unprecedented four OxTravels events over the ten days of the festival. I was fortunate to be in Hay to attend the first two. The first, with Colin Thubron, Anthony Sattin, Tiffany Murray and David Shukman, was attended by almost 1,000 people, appropriately on the Oxfam Stage. OxTravels editor, Mark Ellingham, chaired an enjoyable discussion on travel writing. Among the questions was one about whether an aspiring travel writer should travel alone (as another OxTravels contributor, Paul Theroux, attests)? Colin responded by saying he travels alone as he can never persuade anyone to travel with him! He went on to say that his notebooks are his most valued companions. David, the BBC’s Science and Environment Correspondent, talked about the way in which taking a television crew on his travels had informed his choices when he came to write his book, Reporting Live From the End of the World, as well as his OxTravels story. As well as keeping notebooks, he said it helps to have a DVD to remind one of the details one may have forgotten or missed out of the notebook.

All four writers read from their OxTravels stories – Anthony’s is an intriguing and slightly macabre story about a man who lives in the City of the Dead in Cairo; Colin’s is about a chance encounter with a rickshaw driver in Myanmar who has a dark past; novelist Tiffany Murray’s remarkable meeting is actually with an inanimate object (a Big Yellow Taxi) rather than a person; and David’s trip to the Amazon reveals unexpected human costs to the deforestation that is devastating the rainforests.

On Sunday, Mark was joined by four more writers – Oliver Bullough, Raja Shehadeh, Michael Jacobs and Horatio Clare. Michael regaled us with the surprising confession that he had misunderstood his brief. When asked to contribute to a book subtitled “meetings with remarkable writers” he modestly took this to mean that he had to describe a meeting he had had with a remarkable writer. The result is an extraordinary encounter with Ryszard Kapuscinski on a plane travelling to Tumbuktu. Kapuscinksi was there to research his classic travel book, “Shadow of the Sun”.

Inevitably, mention of Kapuscinski raised the question whether travel writers are allowed to make things up (Kapuscinski became notorious after his death in 2007 when it was revealed that he had routinely done just that). Our writers confessed that this was sometimes necessary in order to make a narrative work, however all emphasised the importance of getting to the truth of an experience.

Again, we were treated to readings from all four writers. Oliver’s powerful piece is a story he collected at the time he was researching his book “Let Our Fame Be Great” but was unable to include it – we are very grateful that he allowed us to include it in OxTravels; Raja’s story of attempting to go for a picnic in the Galilee Hills brilliantly exposes the perils of trying to lead an ordinary life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories; while Horatio Clare’s intriguing story asks who are the real villains in today’s global economy? Thought-provoking one and all, they demonstrate why OxTravels is a masterclass in travel writing and deserves to be a popular success.

Thanks to all the authors for taking part in these events and for signing their books in the Oxfam bookshop afterwards. And congratulations to Oliver Bullough, who won this year’s Oxfam Prize for Emerging Writers.

Michael Palin toasts the launch of OXTRAVELS in the company of a host of brilliant OxTravellers at Daunt Books Marylebone

Writer and historian William Dalrymple (middle) and actor, Python, TV-traveller-extraordinaire Michael Palin toast the launch last week of OxTravels, along with the editor, Mark Ellingham.

OxTravels: Meetings With Remarkable Travel Writers is published by Profile Books in support of Oxfam. Michael Palin, who wrote the introduction to the anthology, took to the stage at Daunt Books in Marylebone, to toast the brilliant travel writers, many of whom were present, who have so generously contributed their stories, and said, ‘It’s a great book for a great cause.’

David McCullough,(pictured with Victoria Hislop) Trading Director at Oxfam, added, ‘OxTravels is a fantastic book, and we are so happy to be collaborating with Profile again. Profile and Oxfam’s 2009 project Ox-Tales raised £137,000 for Oxfam and we hope that OxTravels will raise even more for our life-changing work around the world.’

OxTravels contributors Aminatta Forna (pictured here with William Dalrymple), Sara Wheeler, Oliver Bullough, Tom Bullough, John Gimlette, Victoria Hislop, Michael Jacobs, John Julius Norwich, Sarah Maguire, Nicholas Shakespeare, David Shukman, Colin Thubron and Jasper Winn were all present to toast publication. Aminatta has recently won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Book of the Year 2011 and is on the shortlist for the Orange Prize, to be announced very shortly.

 OxTravels is BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week from Monday 30 May until Friday 3 June (go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qftk) and there will be four more launch events featuring the contributors at this year’s Hay Festival.

It’s not too late to get involved - send off for your collector’s kit - here’s the link:

http://www.oxfam.org.uk/shop/content/books/book-collector.html

Books do furnish a room.  It’s certainly true in our house; in fact, books are threatening to furnish every single room, block the light from the windows and prevent us from opening the fridge. I’m exaggerating, of course but it’s possibly time to have a good sort out.  The problem is that I hate throwing books away and, anyway, I love having books furnishing my rooms.

My books are a trace of my life, not so precise as photos, but more personal, more private.  Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse gives me a slightly embarrassed feeling as I recall my rather precious teenage sighs and longings. There’s that copy of George Orwell’s Burmese Days that I was reading in the last few days of my first pregnancy more than forty years ago, in a 1960s wicker rocking chair. I remember reading Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain during an obviously not very demanding temping assignment, my tears dripping between the keys of the typewriter.  There are books I read on beaches (Sophie’s Choice, Hardy’s Tess, Bernard McClaverty’s Grace Notes) and on trains (Patrick Gale’s Notes at an Exhibition, Fear of Flying by Erica Jong); there’s The Lost Continent – the first of several books by Bill Bryson which I was forbidden to read in bed because my laughter made the bed shake so much. (And I haven’t even mentioned poetry, texts from school and university, children’s books….)
But, but….Oxfam’s national book donation drive is fully underway and I must send some less treasured books to my local Oxfam bookshop.  We have a huge (but achievable) target of an additional 330,000 books in three weeks. That’s just 25 books per shop, per week. If I can find 25 books to donate, so can others and that’s why I’ve applied to be an Oxfam book collector.
Any day now the book collector kit (stickers, posters and flyers) should arrive and I’m asking friends and family, nextdoor neighbours to donate.   I’ll keep you posted on how that’s going.