Blogger Wins First Blooker Prize
From www.telegraph.co.uk: Blogger is winner of "Blooker". Read carefully. That's Blooker, not Booker.
First prize for the cook who turned her internet diary into a book
By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent
(Filed: 03/04/2006)
Food beat sex and New York trounced London in a competition that claims to be the world's most universal literary prize.
The first Blooker Prize - for books that began life as "blogs" (weblogs) on the worldwide web - was awarded last night to Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, an American cult book about "extreme cooking" that has been described as Nigella Lawson meets Bridget Jones.
British hopes had been pinned on Belle de Jour: Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, a book that grew out of an anonymous "blog" serialising the reputed diary of a prostitute that caused a minor sensation two years ago with up to 15,000 people a day logging on to its website.
The winner of the first Blooker is a first-time New York writer, Julie Powell.
To relieve the tedium of dead-end jobs - nannying and working as a secretarial temp - she set herself the challenge of trying to cook all 524 recipes from the classic 1961 American cookbook, Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in 365 days in her cramped and ill-equipped Long Island kitchen.
Child is credited with having introduced French cuisine to America and is regarded as that country's answer to Elizabeth David.
As 32-year-old Powell tackled her challenge she embarked upon a widely-followed chick-lit-style "blog" in which she recorded each dish as she created it, along with the details of city life and the daily complaints and love lives of the friends who crowded into her little flat to consume her culinary treats.
Little Brown, the mainstream publisher, turned the "blog" into a book and it quickly sold 100,000 copies. It has just been published in Britain and a Hollywood studio is in discussion to turn it into a film.
Powell told The Daily Telegraph yesterday that her favourite to play her in a film was the British actress Kate Winslet. She said: "She can curse right and she looks as though she's eaten French food before."
The organisers of the Blooker Prize, Lulu.com, an American online print-on-demand publishing company, says it wants its prize - which is worth $2,000 (£1,140) to the winner - to become better known than the £50,000 British Booker Prize within five years.
By coincidence, Powell has a connection with the Booker. "The first-ever recipient of the Blooker Prize is the former nanny of the first-ever two-time recipient of the Booker Prize. I think that's kind of neat," she said yesterday
Eight years ago, Powell worked for 12 months as nanny to the family of Peter Carey, the Australian novelist, when they lived in Manhattan.
Carey's Oscar and Lucinda won the Booker in 1988 and he became a double-winner in 2001 with his novel, True History of the Kelly Gang. Powell, whose success has allowed her to buy a better New York apartment, said that the time and cost of her cookery marathon had put great strain on her marriage.
Child's recipes are elaborate, so working outside the house and then cooking often meant that dinner was not ready until after midnight. And the financial strain meant that she was grateful when several fans of her "blog" tracked down her address and sent small sums of money or ingredients through the post.
Powell said: "It was enough to get me through some quite tough times paying the rent. There are 12 recipes requiring a whole leg of lamb. Legs of lamb in New York are not cheap."
Her toughest assigment was following a recipe that needed a whole boned duck. "The recipe was eight-pages long and I had to bone it, keep it from falling apart, stuff it with pate and then cover it with a pastry crust.
"But at the end it was wonderful. It looked just like the picture." Lulu.com claims that "blogs" and "blooks" are the future for literature. There are estimated to be 60 million online "blogs" and they are growing at the rate of 75,000 a day.
The company may be right. A week ago, the Samuel Johnson Prize, a British literary award for the best of the year's non-fiction, unveiled its 2006 shortlist.
On it, for the first time, was a "blook", Baghdad Burning, which is based on the "blog" of an anonymous Iraqi woman.
Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright
First prize for the cook who turned her internet diary into a book
By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent
(Filed: 03/04/2006)
Food beat sex and New York trounced London in a competition that claims to be the world's most universal literary prize.
The first Blooker Prize - for books that began life as "blogs" (weblogs) on the worldwide web - was awarded last night to Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, an American cult book about "extreme cooking" that has been described as Nigella Lawson meets Bridget Jones.
British hopes had been pinned on Belle de Jour: Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, a book that grew out of an anonymous "blog" serialising the reputed diary of a prostitute that caused a minor sensation two years ago with up to 15,000 people a day logging on to its website.
The winner of the first Blooker is a first-time New York writer, Julie Powell.
To relieve the tedium of dead-end jobs - nannying and working as a secretarial temp - she set herself the challenge of trying to cook all 524 recipes from the classic 1961 American cookbook, Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in 365 days in her cramped and ill-equipped Long Island kitchen.
Child is credited with having introduced French cuisine to America and is regarded as that country's answer to Elizabeth David.
As 32-year-old Powell tackled her challenge she embarked upon a widely-followed chick-lit-style "blog" in which she recorded each dish as she created it, along with the details of city life and the daily complaints and love lives of the friends who crowded into her little flat to consume her culinary treats.
Little Brown, the mainstream publisher, turned the "blog" into a book and it quickly sold 100,000 copies. It has just been published in Britain and a Hollywood studio is in discussion to turn it into a film.
Powell told The Daily Telegraph yesterday that her favourite to play her in a film was the British actress Kate Winslet. She said: "She can curse right and she looks as though she's eaten French food before."
The organisers of the Blooker Prize, Lulu.com, an American online print-on-demand publishing company, says it wants its prize - which is worth $2,000 (£1,140) to the winner - to become better known than the £50,000 British Booker Prize within five years.
By coincidence, Powell has a connection with the Booker. "The first-ever recipient of the Blooker Prize is the former nanny of the first-ever two-time recipient of the Booker Prize. I think that's kind of neat," she said yesterday
Eight years ago, Powell worked for 12 months as nanny to the family of Peter Carey, the Australian novelist, when they lived in Manhattan.
Carey's Oscar and Lucinda won the Booker in 1988 and he became a double-winner in 2001 with his novel, True History of the Kelly Gang. Powell, whose success has allowed her to buy a better New York apartment, said that the time and cost of her cookery marathon had put great strain on her marriage.
Child's recipes are elaborate, so working outside the house and then cooking often meant that dinner was not ready until after midnight. And the financial strain meant that she was grateful when several fans of her "blog" tracked down her address and sent small sums of money or ingredients through the post.
Powell said: "It was enough to get me through some quite tough times paying the rent. There are 12 recipes requiring a whole leg of lamb. Legs of lamb in New York are not cheap."
Her toughest assigment was following a recipe that needed a whole boned duck. "The recipe was eight-pages long and I had to bone it, keep it from falling apart, stuff it with pate and then cover it with a pastry crust.
"But at the end it was wonderful. It looked just like the picture." Lulu.com claims that "blogs" and "blooks" are the future for literature. There are estimated to be 60 million online "blogs" and they are growing at the rate of 75,000 a day.
The company may be right. A week ago, the Samuel Johnson Prize, a British literary award for the best of the year's non-fiction, unveiled its 2006 shortlist.
On it, for the first time, was a "blook", Baghdad Burning, which is based on the "blog" of an anonymous Iraqi woman.
Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright
posted by manzarali at
11:14 PM
