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Awards for the blogger-writers

Owen Gibson

`Blooker' prize celebrates a new hybrid literary form

LONDON: A 32-year-old New Yorker who spent a year trying to master every recipe in a book of French cookery has become the inaugural winner of a prize devoted to books born of blogs.

While its better known near-namesake has on occasion been accused of elitism, the Blooker Prize claims to be based on more democratic principles. All the books, or "blooks," entered for the award started life as blogs.

Attempt

Julie Powell, a frustrated unpublished author approaching 30 in a dead end office job, came up with the idea of attempting to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child's 1961 cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Her husband suggested chronicling her efforts online, where her musings on life, love and cooking drew an ever-larger cult following. The blog led to a publishing deal, and the resulting tome — Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Kitchen Apartment — sold more than 100,000 copies. She beat two British bloggers-turned-authors on the shortlist, the online call girl diarist Belle de Jour, who triggered many newspaper column inches speculating on her identity last year, and Egg, Bacon, Chips and Beans, a literary tribute to London's `greasy spoon' cafes by Russell Davies.

Ms. Powell credits blogging with kick-starting her writing career. "I had no idea what a blog was a week before I began," she said. "The medium really liberated me and motivated me to do the work and not obsess over the details. The community aspect of blogging and the interaction with others kept me honest, kept me writing and kept me from sinking into my habitual self-loathing."

From an entrepreneur

The prize was established by Bob Young, an American entrepreneur who made a fortune from his Red Hat software business. He launched it partly as a means to promote his latest venture, Lulu.com, which offers anyone the chance to upload their manuscript to the Internet and publishes books on demand when they are ordered, and partly as a means of honouring a new form of writing.

Publishers are increasingly turning to the blogosphere to uncover new talent. Earlier this month Baghdad Burning, based on the blog of an anonymous Iraqi woman, was nominated for the prestigious Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction. With a new blog launched every second, Ms. Powell, now working on a second non-fiction book and a novel, acknowledged there would be more chaff than wheat. Now that blogging had landed her a publishing deal it was unlikely her next book would follow a similar path, she said, because of the self-conscious knowledge that it would end up in print.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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Awards for the blogger-writers

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