Cover stories: Ian McEwan, Foreign Fiction Prize, Harvill, Gordon Banks
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Your support makes all the difference.Pity the poor, parochial British media. After Ian McEwan was this week spared an award from the commercial hype-fest known as the "Nibbies", reports implied that Atonement has failed in all its competitive outings. Not true at all: McEwan's novel has just won the Europe/Asia section of the Commonwealth Writers Prize. This is a far more significant affair, with a magnificent track record – it gave the first proper recognition to much-loved modern classics such as Captain Corelli's Mandolin and A Suitable Boy. This year's other regional winners are, from Africa, Nadine Gordimer for The Pickup; from Canada and the Caribbean, Alice Munro for Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; and from Australasia/Pacific, the strange and marvellous Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan – out here soon from Scribner. Now all the winners go forward to the final judging process, to be held in Edinburgh next month. The "Nibbies" are given away by B-list celebs in a West End hotel. The Commonwealth Writers Prize will be awarded by HRH the Princess Royal at Holyrood Palace on 24 April.
Meanwhile, two titles on our shortlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize are also contenders for the fiction division of this year's Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize. Novels by Agnès Desarthe (Five Photos of My Wife) and W G Sebald (Austerlitz) are joined by Zvi Jagendorf's Booker-longlisted Wolfy and the Strudelbakers and Emma Richler's début, Sister Crazy. In non-fiction, the JQ shortlist pits two memoirs of London family life – John Gross's A Double Thread and Oliver Sacks's Uncle Tungsten – against a pair of rediscovered voices from mid-century Europe: Mihail Sebastian's Journal 1935-44 and Joseph Roth's The Wandering Jews. The prizes, each worth £4,000, are announced on 2 May.
Harvill, founded in 1947 and for a long time part of the Collins empire, is once again to lose its independence. Bought out of the Murdoch-owned group in 1995 by the charismatic MD, Christopher MacLehose, it seems set to become part of Random House. Despite having raised more money from its shareholders, the country's premier independent publisher of translated fiction is struggling hard in an industry that places an emphasis on front-list ephemera. It seems likely that, though the Harvill name will live on, its Panther paperback list (which includes such evergreens as Doctor Zhivago and The Leopard) will be folded into Vintage. The offer has now gone to Harvill's 50 shareholders, who include Roger Straus, doyen of US literary publishing, and Tim Waterstone, a keen Harvill supporter. Harvill's roster includes Solzhenitsyn, Bulgakov, Richard Ford and Peter Høeg, whose Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow provided the firm with a surprise bestseller.
Last year it was Geoff Hurst's turn. Now, Gordon Banks, the England goalkeeper in the 1966 World Cup team, is having his say. Michael Joseph has paid £300,000 for his memoirs.
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