Waterstones Eleven

This is the third year that The Waterstones Eleven project has been running. If you don't know about the project, the basic idea behind it is that eleven promising  fiction novels are selected and Waterstones promotes them throughout the year.

"The Waterstones Eleven puts new writing at the forefront of the literary calendar and it has quickly become a celebration our readers trust" - James Daunt, Waterstones Managing Director

So here are the eleven novels that have been selected for 2013.

January - Y by Marjorie Celona  
Marjorie Celona received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts fellow and the recipient of the John C. Schupes fellowship. In recent years, she has been the Olive B. O'connor fellow at Colgate University and writer-in-residence at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Non-required Reading, Harvard Review, Glimmer Train, and Crazyhorse, amongst others.

February - The Universe Versus Alex Woods by Gavin Extence 
Gavin Extence was born in 1982 and grew up in the interestingly named village of Swineshead, Lincolnshire. From ages 5-11, he enjoyed a brief but illustrious career as a chess player, winning numerous national championships and travelling to Moscow and St Petersberg to pit his wits against the finest young minds in Russia. He only won one game.

March -  The Fields by Kevin Maher 
Kevin Maher was born and brought up in Dublin, moving to London in 1996 to begin a career in journalism. He wrote for the Guardian, the Observer and Time Out, and was the film editor of The Face until 2002, before joining The Times, where for the last eight years, he has been a feature writer, critic and columnist.

April - Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi 
Taiye Selasi was born in London and raised in Boston to parents of Ghanaian and Nigerian origin. She is a graduate of Yale and Oxford Universities. Her seminal essay 'Afropolitans' was published in the cult magazine LiP in 2005 before going viral and being used to define a new generation. Her story 'The Sex Lives of African Girls' was published in Granta in 2011.

May - Idiopathy by Sam Byers
Sam Byers was born in 1979. He is a graduate of the Ma in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He has published fiction in Granta, Tank, and Blank Pages and regularly reviews books for the TLS. 

June - The Son by Michel Rostain 
Michel Rostain lives in Arles. Born in 1942, he works as an opera stage director, and direction the National Theatre of Quimper - Cornwall Theatre - from 1995 to 2008. The Son is his first novel and won the Prix Goncourt in 2011.

July - The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan 
Donal Ryan was born in a village of north Tipperary, a stroll from the shores of Lough Derg. Donal wrote his first draft of The Spinning Heart in the long summer evening of 2010, and has also completed a second novel.

August - Ballistics by DW Wilson
DW Wilson was born in raised in the small towns of Kootenay Valley, British Columbia. He is the recipient of the University of East Anglia's inaugural Man Booker Prize Scholarship - the most prestigious award available to students in the MA programme. He lives in Lonon. Once You Break a Knuckle, his debut story collection, was published by Bloomsbury in 2012. It was short-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize.

September - Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
Hannah Kent was born in Adelaide in 1985. As a teenager, she travelled to Iceland on a Rotary Exchange, where she first heard the story of Agnes Magnusdottir. Hannah is the co-founder and deputy editor of Australian literary journal Kill Your Darlings, and is completing her PhD at Flinders University. In 2011, she won the inaugural Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award.

October - Marriage Material by Sathnam Sanghera
Sathnam Sanghera was born in 1976. He is a columnist and comment writer for The Times. His first book, The Boy with the Topknot: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton was short-listed for the 2005 Costa Biography Award and the 2009 PEN/Ackerley Prize and named 2009 Mind Book of the Year.

November - Pig's Foot by Carlos Acosta 
Carlos Acosta was born in Havana in 1973 and trained at the National Ballet School of Cuba. He was been principal at the English National Ballet, the Houston Ballet, The American Ballet Theatre and the Royal Ballet, and has danced as a guest artist all over the world, winning numerous international awards. He is also author of the autobiography No Way Home. 

So there you have it, the top eleven that have been chosen for this year. If you click HERE it will take you to the Waterstones page where all the information above is. Similarly, you can read or download a sample chapter of each book, meaning you can decide whether or not it something you might like to purchase once it has been published. I haven't personally read through them all, but I did have a look at the synopsis for May's choice, Idiopathy by Sam Byers and I think that I might have to try that, once available.

Brogan :)