Cover Stories

This time next week, all eyes will be on the Booker shortlist, but spare a thought for another prize with a longer and (some would say) more trustworthy track-record. This column can, exclusively, bring you the shortlist for the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for the best book by an author under 35. And very impressive it is too: Shadow Box by Antonia Logue; Our Fathers by Andrew O'Hagan; The Africa House by Christina Lamb; The Blue Bedspread by Raj Kamal Jha; Ghostwritten by David Mitchell; Affinity by Sarah Waters. In the past, the JLR prize has gone to tyros such as Nicola Barker, A L Kennedy, Andrew Motion, Jeanette Winterson and the forever-young A N Wilson, who managed to win it twice.

This time next week, all eyes will be on the Booker shortlist, but spare a thought for another prize with a longer and (some would say) more trustworthy track-record. This column can, exclusively, bring you the shortlist for the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for the best book by an author under 35. And very impressive it is too: Shadow Box by Antonia Logue; Our Fathers by Andrew O'Hagan; The Africa House by Christina Lamb; The Blue Bedspread by Raj Kamal Jha; Ghostwritten by David Mitchell; Affinity by Sarah Waters. In the past, the JLR prize has gone to tyros such as Nicola Barker, A L Kennedy, Andrew Motion, Jeanette Winterson and the forever-young A N Wilson, who managed to win it twice.

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It's been a while since her last attempt, which coincided with the movie Scandal, but Christine Keeler is at it again. The Truth At Last, the latest version of her account of the Profumo Affair, will coincide with the 40th anniversary of the scandal. Sidgwick & Jackson, who publish next spring, held a party for Keeler at Cliveden where, frolicking among the rhododendra, it all began. These days, she and her son renovate old houses.

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V S Naipaul continues to show his displeasure at Paul Theroux's hatchet-job Sir Vidia's Shadow. Sir Vidia has ended his long association with the Penguin Group, which also publishes Theroux, and decamped to Picador, who will publish his forthcoming novel, Half a Life, as well as 15 backlist titles that Penguin has been forced to relinquish.

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The theme of National Poetry Day next Thursday is "fresh voices", but there's an opportunity to celebrate some old ones, too. Palgrave, Macmillan's newly renamed academic list, is reissuing a facsimile edition of the book from which the list takes its name, Palgrave's Golden Treasury. First published in 1861 at the suggestion of Tennyson, then Poet Laureate, the anthology had sold 650,000 copies by 1939. The reissue has a foreword by the present Laureate, Andrew Motion.