Towel Day?

If you are a fan of the late Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you’ll know that the 25th May is Towel Day in his honour.  It’s a simple concept, wear a towel around your neck all day in Adams’ honour.

Other things you can do are 

• upload a picture on Facebook
• use the above graphic as your facebook cover – it was created by Oren Mashovski. Get it here!
• post on Flickr (tag it “#towelday” and add it to the group)
• post a video on YouTube.

There are more ideas on the Towel Day website

Locally, (well in Sydney), the Kinokuniya bookstore is offering customers who wear a towel on Towel Day 20% off on their full price book purchase. But you must have your towel around your neck when you approach the cashier staff, your towel should preferably be a bathroom towel or large hand towel, and there is only one discount per towel and one discount per person.
Facebook event

Categories and winners:

Christina Stead Prize (Fiction)
Mateship with Birds, Carrie Tiffany

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UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing

The Last Thread, Michael Sala

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Douglas Stewart Prize (Non‐fiction)
The Office: A Hardworking History, Gideon Haigh

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Kenneth Slessor Prize (Poetry)
Ruby Moonlight, Ali Cobby‐Eckermann

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PatriciaWrightson Prize (Children’s Literature)
The Ghost of Miss Annabel Spoon, Aaron Blabey

Floundering by Romy Ash

The Beloved by Annah Faulkner

Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser

The Mountain by Drusilla Modjeska

Mateship with Birds by Carrie Tiffany

The winner of the $60,000 prize will be announced on June 19 at The National Library of Australia in Canberra.  The other five shortlisted authors will receive $5,000 from Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

You can read a synopsis and Judges notes for each shortlisted book here.

This is a reminder for the live twitter discussion next Tuesday 28 May starting at 8pm Australian Eastern Standard Time. Use the tags #indigiread and #rwpchat as you discuss the reading, watching, playing that is your experience of indigenous reading, so others can join in the conversation too.

The Twitter book group meets on the last Tuesday of every month so pop that in your diary, smartphone, MS Outlook, or tattoo it on your arm. Just remember and join in!

Come along to hear Mark speak, followed by afternoon tea. Our partners, Megalong Books, will be selling copies of the book on the day, and Mark will be available for book signing.
This is a free event, bookings are appreciated.
For further information, or to register your interest, contact Katoomba Library on 4780 5750.

Author Maggie Counihan at Blaxland Library.

Today we were lucky enough to host a wonderful author talk at Blaxland Library with the adventurous author and traveller Maggie Counihan, who truly embodies her own motto that “Age is no barrier”. Her first book, Backpacking to Freedom: Solo at Sixty details how, at the age of sixty, Maggie went on her first solo trip to India – and has never looked back. This book, as well as her latest book, Bring on the Birthdays: Ageing with Adventures, are now available from her website: http://www.maggie-rollo.com. This website also has a selection of great travel photos and  insightful travel tips from Maggie and her partner Rollo.

If you couldn’t make it to the talk at Blaxland today, never fear because Maggie had some time to chat with us for our ‘Indigi-Read’ podcast for May. Click here to listen as she discusses her early life and her life-changing decision to follow her dreams and experience the world on her terms.

Philip Hensher has won the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje prize for his novel “Scenes from Early Life”, a fictional account of his husband’s childhood in Bangladesh. Reserve your copy here!

“An unostentatious tour de force, combining a tender and richly affectionate family memoir with a vividly evoked portrait of town and country life and the story of the birth of a nation. It is full of surprises”. Margaret Drabble

“In this surprisingly gentle story, Hensher performs a fascinating act of ventriloquism, taking on the voice of his Bangladeshi husband, who was born in Dacca in 1970, when East Paskistan was on the edge of fighting a bloody war of independence. Maybe it is the fact of being an outsider, while at the same time being intimately connected with his narrator, that enabled Hensher to describe the hubbub of a country’s political transition with such immediacy; we enter an unfamiliar world with him and smell and taste and hear it on all sides”. Julia Blackburn 

“I think the novelist and critic Allan Massie hit the nail on the head when he suspected the book was ‘a labour of love’. Few writers can have conceived the bygone life of their in-laws so tenderly, humourously and affectionately, let alone a family so remote in place, language and culture from the writer’s own experience. It’s a peculiar project, no doubt, but Philip Hensher brings it off magnificently”. Ian Jack