Nominations for the 2014 Saboteur Awards are now open! Tickets can be bought here. Like the literature and performances they celebrate, the Saboteur Awards are ephemeral and ever-changing. But some things stay the same: we’re always looking to reward work that has, since our last awards, really made us and/or our readers sit up and take notice…
-Compiled by Richard T. Watson- We have a Christmas tradition of sorts at Sabotage: to post a festive round-up of the year’s highlights in December, and to start by (mis)quoting that carol about it being the season to be jolly. And what is Christmas without its twee traditions? So here goes, 365 days from the…
-in which James Webster sums up the categories he presented at the awards – Best Performer When it came down to the final day, Best Spoken Word Performer was the most closely contested of all the categories, with first place going back and forth several times and only three votes separating the winner and runner-up.…
-In which Richard T. Watson sums up the Fiction side of the Saboteur 2013 Awards- The first of the Fiction stable’s awards was for the Best Short Story Collection by a single author. Four out of five nominees were traditionally-printed books, while one (Superbard’s The Flood) was designed specifically for the iPad and featured a…
-Reviewed by Nick Sweeney- The Middle is a short, powerful book about journeys, both actual and metaphorical, through hope and failure, but ultimately towards the suggestion, at least, of some kind of redemption. The characters, a boy – actually in his late teens – a man who feels the breath of middle age on his…
-Reviewed by Lucy Ayrton- Adventures in Form is a beautifully curated anthology of contemporary poets engaging strongly with form in their work. The poems are clustered under 15 areas (Code is Poetry, Traditional Revised and Correspondence, to name three), each reflecting an approach to exploring form. The introduction to the book (by Tom Chivers) was…
-Reviewed by Charlotte Barnes- I approached Second Lives: Tales From Two Cities with apprehension, given that I was somewhat unprepared for what the anthology would contain. It markets itself as a collection of views provided by various writers in order to portray individual perceptions on the once-industrial cities of Glasgow and Pittsburgh. The anthology combines…
-Reviewed by Richard T. Watson- Around ten per cent of York’s working population is employed in tourism, directly or indirectly, and more than a handful of those are employed in the city’s competitive ghost story industry. The historic centre is crammed with ghost tours, the spooks seeping through ancient cobblestone streets that have seen Romans,…
-Reviewed by Rebecca Burns- I haven’t read much in the way of translated texts before so this was my first exposure to many of the writers featured in Best European Fiction 2013. And, as the editors of the anthology might hope, as too the individual writers, I was so struck by the quality of the…
-Reviewed by Richard T. Watson- The earliest stories were told through word-of-mouth, and passed on with slight variations by being told over and again to new generations. Imagine narrating to groups of rapt listeners, probably huddled round a fire in their cave, hoping the power of the spoken word can hold back the terrors of…