Six finalists have been named for this year's Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, the Bookseller reported. The winner will be named March 21. Prize custodian Horace Bent commented: "It is a truly inspiring list celebrating the art of title-making that goes from the sublime to the fantastic." This year's shortlisted titles are:
Working Class Cats: The Bodega Cats of New York City by Chris Balsiger and Erin Canning
Are Trout South African? by Duncan Brown
How to Poo on a Date by Mats & Enzo
Pie-ography: Where Pie Meets Biography by Jo Packham
How to Pray When You're Pissed at God by Ian Punnett
The Origin of Feces by David Walter-Toews
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Abir Mukherjee's A Rising Man won the Telegraph Harvill Secker Crime Writing Prize, which offers publication and a £5,000 (about US$8,331) advance. The Bookseller reported that the prize "was launched last July with the aim of finding an unpublished crime writer. "
Alison Hennessey, senior crime editor at Harvill Secker and the founder of the prize, called A Rising Man "a very worthy winner," with the opening chapters of the book "beautifully written, atmospheric and intelligent, with a great setting and a wonderfully wry sense of humor throughout."
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Art in Oceania: A New History won the £1,000 Art Book Prize, the Bookseller reported. The prize, administered by the Authors' Club and supported by the Art Newspaper, "is awarded annually to the best book on art or architecture published in English, anywhere in the world." Published by Thames & Hudson, Art in Oceania was written by anthropologists, art historians and curators of both European and Pacific Islands descent, including Peter Brunt, Nicholas Thomas, Sean Mallon, Lissant Bolton, Deidre Brown, Damian Skinner and Susanne Küchler.
