NEWANGLE PRIZE FOR LITERATURE – the winner is announced The New Angle Prize for Literature is a biennial award organised by the Ipswich Institute and sponsored by Scrutton Bland and Gotelee Solicitors. The award recognises authors whose writing is inspired by the region of East Anglia. There are no categories – entries simply have to have a strong regional theme.
T his year’s awards saw the first all-female shortlist since 2009 (when the literary prize began). At an awards dinner held in September Julia Blackburn’s Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske was announced as the winner, with Jill Dawson’s The Crime Writer awarded runner-up position , and Rosy Thornton’s Sandlands was the winner of the Suffolk Libraries Readers’ Choice Award. Threads is an unconventional biography of John Craske, an obscure Norfolk fisherman. Craske became a painter and embroiderer after falling ill whilst training with the army in 1917 leaving him prone to intermittent bouts of a ‘stuporous state’. Living in a tiny hut on the north Norfolk coast, Craske began to paint, and then to embroider, creating exquisite works depicting the sea and the people who worked on it. He died in 1943, whilst working on a 9ft embroidery of the evacuation of Dunkirk, based purely on what he had heard on the radio. After his death he was largely forgotten, until Julia Blackburn decided to piece together the fragments of his life and work. She has taken a tangential approach, talking to the descendants of people who knew him: local residents; museum curators; fishermen – crafting and stitching together these encounters, and interspersing them with examples of Craske’s delicate work. Runner-up for this year’s prize was The Crime Writer by Jill Dawson, a fictional biography of American crime writer Patricia Highsmith’s few months in Suffolk in the 1960s. Highsmith has long been recognised as being one of the most eccentric novelists of the twentieth century, and Jill Dawson’s novel taps into that dark strangeness to create a compelling tale of madness and murder.
In the words of the judges, Julia Blackburn’s Threads is “a beautiful, surprising book that defies definition: it’s about biography, landscape, art, history and grief”. In commenting on runner-up Jill Dawson they described her novel as “…immensely rewarding, but also deeply disconcerting. Like Patricia Highsmith, the Crime Writer in question, we start to lose our own grip on reality”. The New Angle Prize is organised by the Ipswich Institute: an independent library and reading room, and the only surviving Birkbeck foundation outside London. As well as the literary prize they run a number of courses, lectures and events, and offer “not only an intriguing part of the town’s history but also a refreshing antidote to today’s busy and materialistic world”. Find out more about them at www.ipswichinstitute.org.uk or tel 01473 253992. Scrutton Bland work with a number of charities and not-for-profit organisations across the region to provide insurance, audit, accounting and other financial advice. To talk to one of our advisers please call 01473 267000 or 01206 838400 or go to our website www.scruttonbland.co.uk
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