Pinay Author Scores Worldwide Deal With UK Publishing Giant –- But Hands RP Rights To Pinoy Publisher

PINAY AUTHOR SCORES WORLDWIDE DEAL WITH UK PUBLISHING GIANT – BUT HANDS RP RIGHTS TO PINOY PUBLISHER

Former Philippine Daily Inquirer journalist Candy Quimpo Gourlay this week sold her novel TALL STORY to David Fickling Books (DFB), joining a prestigious list that includes John Boyne (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas) and Philip Pullman (The Golden Compass). DFB praises the book as “an outstanding and highly original novel”.

Candy, who lives in London, however reserved Philippine publication rights for publisher Ramon “RayVi” Sunico in the Philippines. Sunico is the manager of Cacho Publishing House, which has pioneered in bringing teen fiction to the Philippine publishing scene.

“It was so important to me that a Pinoy publisher will be the one who brings my writing to the Filipino public. I am thrilled that RayVi is going to be that publisher,” Candy said. In turn, Sunico writes, “From the moment I discovered Candy’s blog and read the wonderfully wrought prose of Volcano Boy and then Tall Story, I knew that getting her read here would benefit not only the growing field of Philippine Young Adult lit but inspire the many young Filipinos who will be her readers.”

Says Bella Pearson, Editorial Director of DFB: “It isn’t often that I am in fits of laughter one minute and in tears the next — TALL STORY is one of the warmest, funniest, most moving books I’ve read in a long time — and Candy Gourlay is a rare and new voice in children’s fiction. We are feeling immensely excited (and smug!) to be able to add her name to the DFB list.”

Notes for Editors

David Fickling Books is publisher of quality picture books and fiction, and is home to some of the most bestselling and highly acclaimed authors including Philip Pullman (published by DFB in the UK only), John Boyne, Mark Haddon (published by DFB in the UK only) and Jenny Downham. Its authors have won all of the major literary prizes including the Costa Children’s Book of the Year, the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, and most recently the Carnegie Medal. David Fickling Books is an imprint of Random House Children’s Books UK and Random House Children’s Books in the United States and is based in Oxford, England and New York, USA.

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Here is the UK announcement from David Fickling Books:

PUBLISHING GIANT ACQUIRES GIANT NOVEL
David Fickling Books is enormously proud to announce the acquisition of a new stand-(tall)-alone novel, TALL STORY!
TALL STORY by Candy Gourlay is an outstanding and highly original novel for 10yrs+. The deal was negotiated by Hilary Delamere from The Agency and David Fickling.

This is a book about Bernardo, a boy who lives in the Philippines, and Bernardo is tall. Not just tall, he’s 8ft tall. Bernardo is actually a GIANT! In a novel packed with humour and quirkiness, Gourlay explores a touching sibling relationship and the comedic results of two very different cultures colliding.

Editorial director, Bella Pearson, knew there was something special from the first page: “It isn’t often that I am in fits of laughter one minute and in tears the next -TALL STORY is one of the warmest, funniest, most moving books I’ve read in a long time -and Candy Gourlay is a rare and new voice in children’s fiction. We are feeling immensely excited (and smug!) to be able to add her name to the DFB list.”
Candy Gourlay was born in Manila during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. She was in her twenties when she moved to the UK after covering the revolution that overthrew Marcos. In addition to journalism and writing for children, Candy is involved in a range of media: blogging, designing websites and even creating YouTube videos.
Candy is passionate about embracing and exploiting the digital world to promote books, meeting other like-minded people and reaching out to younger readers online. She runs the popular blog Notes from the Slushpile for aspiring writers. TALL STORY will be Candy’s first full-length published novel.

TALL STORY will be published in June 2010 in hardback and will be launched with widespread digital publicity and buzz; David Fickling Books in the US will publish later in the year and Hilary Delamere has negotiated a separate edition to be launched in the Philippines by Ramon Sunico’s Cacho Publishing House.

Notes for Editors
David Fickling Books is publisher of quality picture books and fiction, and is home to some of the most bestselling and highly acclaimed authors including Philip Pullman (published by DFB in the UK only), John Boyne, Mark Haddon (published by DFB in the UK only) and Jenny Downham. Its authors have won all of the major literary prizes including the Costa Children’s Book of the Year, the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, and most recently the Carnegie Medal. David Fickling Books is an imprint of Random House Children’s Books UK and Random House Children’s Books in the United States and is based in Oxford, England and New York, USA.

For more information please contact:
Georgia Lawe, Deputy Publicity Director at RHCB
T: 020 8231 6413 or E: glawe@randomhouse.co.uk 

For Fr Tom Green

Today, at about 10 in the morning, Fr Tom Green passed away. He was a man of easy dignity, of deep but unassuming spirituality. He taught me two subjects Philosophy of Language and Wittgenstein. For the second course, we read together as equals the Austrian thinker’s seminal second book, Philosophical Investigations, which helped set me off on my lifelong engagement with language and my fascination with parallel, bilingual texts. To honor his memory, I copied down quotations form the man we read together oh so many years ago.

A new, lovely book from Marcel and Lily Jouve

I just received this announcement for the launch of Secret Namibia, a book of lovely photographs by my friends Marcel and Lily Jouve. Marcel and I worked on Beyond Paris while he was with the French Embassy here in the Philippines. Where Marcel is a keen photographer, Lily is an accomplished painter. While they were here, they also put together the book, 100 Resorts in the Philippines: Places with a Heart, a rare “tourism book” where personal taste trumped cliché and  mere marketing. I miss them and so I am sharing this message they sent to their friends:

This is it, after hours of work, and a few obstacles (publishing a book is not easy), we are very pleased to announce to you that our coffeetable book has been published by Random House Struik. The book is on their web site as one of the top releases of February 2009: [http://www.struik.co.za/ ] and is available in South Africa’s bookstores (CNA, Exclusive
Books). The book will be available in Namibia’s bookstores end of February (CNA, The Book Cellar). We will come to launch it in Windhoek on the 18th of March 2009 at 18h.00, at Bank Windhoek Omba Gallery, in collaboration with the Franco-Namibian Cultural Centre, and we will sell and dedicate the book on this occasion.

For those living in Europe , it will probably be easier to order the book on amazon.com or [ http://www.amazon.fr/]. It can be ordered already, but will be available only in May 2009.
Secret Namibia is an invitation to discover, through colourful and poetic photographs, some of the most secret and spectacular landscapes of rocks and sands of this wild country. 18 regions have been featured, mostly along the Great Escarpment. We give informative text on the geology, fauna, and flora of the regions showcased and practical information to visit the places. This book is our way to pay tribute to Namibia’s beauty and to contribute to promote her as an exceptional tourist destination.

All the best

Lily and Marcel Jouve
French Embassy
1, rue Pont Pirah, Libreville
Gabon, PO Box 2125

Another Excerpt from Beyond Paris: "Just Like in the Movies" by Benoît Duteurtre

Another excerpt from Beyond Paris: Contemporary French Fiction can be found online. This one is “Just Like in the Movies” by Benoît Duteurtre. It was translated by Antonio Mañeru and Ophelia Lizot. The original French title is “Comme au Cinéma” and it comes from his book Drôle de Temps. This was also translated by Antonio Mañeru and Ophelia Lizot. The excerpt can be found in M. Benoît Duteurtre’s own site.The link will bring you to his Welcome page. Just look for “Nouvelles, extraits” on the left side of the page and click on “Extraits en anglais.” The excerpt will be second on the list of entries that drops down.

Candids from the Ateneo Writers Workshop, 22 & 24 Oct 2008

Candids during the Wednesday and Friday afternoon sessions. Was lucky enough to catch 2 very interesting sessions, with one particularly well moderated by Jun Cruz Reyes. He used Lacan and the psychoanalytic method to discuss a particularly interesting story told from the point of view of a murderer: simply brilliant and, at the same time, so respectful of a young writer’s work.

Please check the photo section of this blog. 

Legatum’s Most Properous Countries List 2008

The Legatum Institute (NY) just announced its most prosperous nations list.

Interesting list because according to a spokesman the rankings are determined by taking into account a complex set of factors including economic status, infrastructure, quality of life, amount of leisure time, strong communities, social responsibility, health, happiness (!) etc. To do this, they also use both objective (eg economic and demographic data) and subjective (polls of a country’s population) metrics. I still haven’t checked how (and from whom) they raised the money, their list of “subcontractors” etc.

Still it’s an interesting list. The Philippines (52, tied with Trinidad/Tobago is outranked by Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Thailand. On the other hand, it outranks China, Indonesia (tied with Jamaica mon) and Vietnam.

Curious that the 2 archipelagos are tied with carribean beach/island music-loving, weed-smoking countries. Anyway, here’s a partial list. For the complete 104-country list, click the link above and proceed from there.

1. Australia   
2. Austria/Finland
4. Germany/Singapore/United States
7. Switzerland
8. Hong Kong
9. Denmark/New Zealand
11. Netherlands
12. Sweden
13. Japan
14. Norway/France/Belgium/Canada/United Kingdom
19. Israel
20. Ireland
21. Taiwan
22. Spain
23. Slovenia/Czech Republic
25. Italy
26. South Korea
27. Chile
28. United Arab Emirates
29. Malaysia
30. Kuwait

35. Thailand
52. Philippines/Trinidad and Tobago
54. China
71. Indonesia/Jamaica
80. Vietnam/Uzbekistan

101. Central African Republic
102. Mali/Zambia
104. Yemen

Excerpt from J-M G Le Clezio’s "The Rainy Season"

This story by the 2008 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Jean-Marie Gustave Le  Clezio, was translated and published in Beyond Paris: Contemporary French Fiction by Cacho Publishing House (1998), with help from the French Embassy in the Philippines, particularly M. Marcel Jouve who did most of the coordination with Editions Gallimard in Paris. It is part of Cacho’s Salin [Translation] series. The series editor was Ubaldo Stecconi. Mr Antonio Luis Mañeru made the basic translation. It was this translation upon which Ms Ophelia “Chichi” Fadullon-Lizot based a more literary translation which was then edited and discussed by Marcel Jouve, Eduardo Jose Calasanz, Ubaldo Stecconi, Ramon Sunico and Ms Lizot herself.

All rights reserved. Please do not copy or post in a website without permission from this website or Cacho Publishing House.

The Rainy Season

Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio

Translated by Ophelia Fadullon Lizot and Luis Antonio Mañeru

    Did it rain on the bay on that February day in 1929, when Gaby Kervern boarded the dinghy bringing passengers to the Britannia? From the big ship, the island already seemed distant. The mountaintops seemed to disappear among the clouds. There were people on the quay, under black umbrellas. Departing was a deliverance. On her face and body, Gaby felt a new light, violent, equal to her desire to live. She had already forgotten. She was no longer thinking of what her life was until this moment, her childhood, the poverty in the wooden house of Vacoas and the death of her father.
    Did she think of Claude Portal, Ti coco as he was called, when they wandered across fields of sugar cane or under the rain, ’til the wide Mare aux Vacoas, to peek at Indians washing their hair? Now, she seemed as though she faced a window of time, open to the limitless sky, on an endless sea. She could no longer hear the sound of trains negotiating the gaps between rails, nor trucks rushing down the road, nor the murmur of voices rising from one floor to another across their insignificant relationships. She could only hear the music of rain on tin roofs, brooks flowing on the red earth. She felt the trees shiver, the wind, and the rippling movement through the fields of sugar cane.
    Ti coco. We gave him this nickname without anyone knowing why. Perhaps because of the refrain ti la soif, ti coco, because he was small and kind with his thick Cafre face, slanty eyes, and the funny way he had of trotting behind Gaby like a dog. He was only a year younger than her, but she talked to him, as though he was the youngest of her brothers.  She brought him everywhere. She ordered him around and he immediately, unhesitatingly, did all she asked of him. One day, she might later remember, she told him: “ Ti coco, steal mangoes for me.” He climbed the high wall of the Valens property along the Plaines Wilhelms Road and got the mangoes. The dogs tore his pants and his legs were bleeding, but his face was radiant and his eyes brimming like two blacks slits. It was her twelfth year and Gaby had never lived as carefree a year. Her father was already sick. He stayed home all day locked in his room and Gaby ran all over the roads of Quinze Cantons.
    Suddenly, in that distressing cruelty of girls, Gaby no longer wanted him. Ti coco could not understand. Every day, he would come and wait for her a little further down the road, as though ashamed. Gaby avoided him, passing behind him cunningly, and she was aware of it. There was a strange girl with her, Ananta, an Indian in a pink sari whom she met bathing in the river. This was now her friend. It was with her that Gaby went for baths near the waterfall. They were together every day for a whole year. They would go to the river, walking along the road sheltered under the same big black umbrella. With Ananta, she put flowers on the altar of the Lakshmi goddess in the hole of the Peepul tree. Together, they walked along the paths until they reached the river. They talked, they laughed. He no longer existed. That went on for five years during which Ti coco stayed in the shadows hoping for an impossible return of things. Everyone knew. His friends made fun of him. They teased him. Gaby no longer talked to him. It was never a coincidence whenever she crossed his path together with the Indian in the pink sari. She never turned her head along the road to school or on the streets of Curepipe. It was worse: she actually looked at him, the blue of her iris transparent with indifference. Ti coco no longer had a wide face, nor were his eyes shimmering and slanted. He had become a sad teenager with a sickly body, a big head and the look of an impoverished half-breed. He worked in his father’s cloth shop in Curepipe.
    When Gaby’s father died, Ti coco thought things would change. It was after the terrible scene at the burial. Gaby leaned on him, her face swollen with grief. He again perceived the smell of her soft hair and felt the warmth of her body. Crying, she placed her head on his shoulder. She talked with a funny voice in Creole,  like when they were lost in the fields of sugar cane, boiling in summer, beside Quinze Cantons. It was a funny voice, almost happy, as though she had once more found her soul. He did not have the courage to say anything. His heart beat until it hurt. He was sadder than she was. Maybe he knew it was going to be the last time.

A month later, Gaby left for Europe.

This was how I saw her when she first arrived in Bordeaux, descending the Britannia in March, 1929. She was eighteen years old and new to this country. Everything was about to begin. She was ambitious and vibrant. She radiated beauty. She was tall with the Creole tan and a mass of black hair contrasting the blue of her eyes.
    At her father’s death, she was left with nothing. Her mother died during Gaby’s birth. Her Aunt Emma, who welcomed her to Curepipe, was quickly convinced that Gaby should leave for Europe. There was no place for her on this island. She hated everything that reminded her of her childhood: the poverty, the solitude, the sickness. She hated the heavy heat of the lagoons, the vegetation invading the gardens, the swaying movement of Indians in their saris. What she hated above all were the fevers and the cyclones. Later, whenever she would talk about it, Gaby lumped them all together in the same shiver of horror, the weightiness of the air, the silence preceding the upsurge of wind and rain, and the cold tremors that invaded her body when the fever was about to come.
    Gaby boarded the Britannia and did not leave her cabin until she was sure the island was only a vague blue mist attached to the horizon somewhere in the east, there where night began.
    Aboard the Britannia, Gaby had a fantastic month in the carefree luxury of the large salons on the bright first class decks, overlooking the sunsets of the African coast, the sparkle of the moon on the sea that lay along the equator. She escaped from her third class cabin and the roving eyes of the two old officious women, twins, to whom she had been entrusted by her aunt. She visited the first class cabins with the connivance of a lieutenant in white uniform.
    This was how I imagined her, beautiful, attractive in her light blue cotton dress with the white collar, embellished with a belt she surreptitiously bought at the bazaar of Port Louis, with her black hair tied back in a chignon under a wide-brimmed straw hat. She talked with everyone in the gently undulating salons or sat on a chaise longue, looking at the wake cleaving the ocean in the soft late afternoon breeze. She was perhaps dreaming of what her life would be in this mysterious country she did not know, Bordeaux, dreaming of what awaited her, of Henriette, her mother’s cousin, of Paris, of Champ-de-Mars (the real one), of the theater, the opera, the department stores, the train trips to the ends of the earth!
    This is how I want to see her again. The way she was when she descended from the heights of the Britannia’s gangplank in the cold of a French winter, bringing with her the brilliance and the gentleness of her island, the blue magic of the Indian Ocean, the shimmer of the whitecaps on the reefs, the forests, the dazzling blades of sugarcane, the singing of birds. She must have possessed all that in her; like a blessing that dazzled all the men. For her, life was a banquet, a promise. She represented “Eternal youth, the gaiety and the independence of the Creoles that appeared in her voice and in her accented singing.” She knew that, and she enjoyed using this charm. She readily sang Creole songs, accompanying herself on the piano in the salons of Bordeaux where she was invited. Those who met her at this time never forgot her voice when she sang these sad songs, whose rhythm she accompanied with her bare feet, sometimes dancing while imitating the hip swinging of the women in her country and their accent in this strange language where words were transmogrified into other words.
    It was during these years that she met Jean.  …

Puppies’ Playlist

I made a youtube playlist for those who want to see all the videos.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=ED05D1E9D09C286D 

Here’s my favorite video of the pups

Puppies, puppies, cute little puppieswho doesn’t like puppies?
Perfect when you’re down in the dumpies,
better than wet little guppies!

More videos of Spot’s 10-day-old pups

Spot’s 10-year-old pups

The first of several videos on youtube.