Denise Mina won the £5,000 (about $6,610) Gordon Burn Prize, which honors "brilliant and unique work, the most interesting of contemporary writing," for her novel The Long Drop. In addition to the cash prize, the winning writer may go on a writing retreat of up to three months at Gordon Burn's cottage in Berwickshire, England. The Long Drop was selected from six shortlisted titles of fiction, memoir and travel writing.
Novelist, broadcaster and journalist Ian Sansom, who was one of the judges, said the winning title "is a truly startling and shocking work whose great literary ambition and inventiveness is matched by its moral complexity. In the opinion of the judges, the book upholds and continues that great tradition of literature both as a form of radical inquiry and as great pleasure, epitomized in the work of Gordon Burn."
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The Brewers Guild of New Zealand named Alice Galletly the 2017 Beer Writer of the Year, Booksellers NZ reported, noting that the winner attributed the honor to her columns in Air New Zealand magazine Kia Ora and her book, How to Have a Beer. "It's a very non-serious, personal guide to enjoying beer, full of silly anecdotes and jokes," she said. Guild representative Martin Bennett praised "the sheer force of personality in the writing."
"My approach with beer writing is always to write for non-geeks first and foremost, and to make it as fun and accessible as possible," she said. "The mission of course, is to convert unsuspecting lager drinkers to our cult."