News
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The Big Fella wins Blake Dawson Award for Business Literature
28 Apr 2010
THE BIG FELLA: The Rise and Rise of BHP Billiton by Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin published by Nikki Christer at Random House Australia, has beaten twelve competitors to win this year’s prestigious Blake Dawson Award for Business Literature.
The book tells the compelling story of how BHP and its partner Billiton rose from the humblest beginnings in the Australian outback and on the Indonesian island of Belitung to starry heights on the great bourses of the world. Based on more than 60 exclusive interviews, it rips away the superficial gloss to expose the political and industrial forces that really drive big business in the 21st Century.
The $30,000 prize was launched by Blake Dawson, a leading international law firm, in 2004 and is the largest in Australia for business writing. The award is acknowledged as being one of the nation’s most important awards for business literature, attracting many impressive entries and covering a wide range of topics each year.
The judges – The Hon Mahla Pearlman, Professor Richard Fisher, George Maltby and Alan Cameron – chose The Big Fella from a shortlist of four titles. Guest speaker Thomas Keneally, author of Shindler’s Ark, Gossip from the Forest among others, announced the winner at a dinner in Sydney on April 27.
Peter Thompson, who lives in London and who had flown to Sydney for the occasion, said, ‘We’re delighted and honoured to have won this award. We’ve written five books together as co-authors and it looks like we’ve finally got the hang of it. With Robert working in Canberra and me in London, we exchanged chapters via the internet and the time difference meant we could turn our work around very quickly, often within a 24-hour cycle.’
Thompson’s fifteenth book, Anzac Fury: The Bloody Battle of Crete 1941, was published in Australia on April 1 this year. The subject of his first book, written with Anthony Delano in 1988, was an unauthorised biography of the fraudster Robert Maxwell.
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Agency has six of the top fifteen misery memoirs
27 Apr 2010
The agency has six of the top 15 titles in a list of the top 20 Misery Memoirs for the 13 weeks to 27th March just published in The Book seller:
No 3 - Cathy Glass’s Hidden
No 5 - Cassie Hartie’s I Did Tell, I Did
No 7 - Cathy Glass’s Damaged
No 11 - Alice Jamieson’s Today I’m Alice
No 14 - Cathy Glass’s Cut
No 15 - Cathy Glass’s The Saddest Girl
Congratulations to all the authors and especially Cathy Glass with four titles in the top 15.
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Agency titles remain in bestseller lists
27 Apr 2010
This week’s non-fiction paprerback list shows Cathy Glass’s Cut at no 36 and Damaged at no 41 with Harry Keeble and Kris Holington’s Baby X down from no 16 to no 45.
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I Did Tell, I Did sells over 70,000 copies
02 Apr 2010
Congratulations to Cassie Harte whose I Did Tell, I Did has now sold 70,176 copies in the UK
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Twelfth week in bestseller lists for Baby X
02 Apr 2010
Baby X remains in the bestseller lists for a twelfth week – this week at no 19
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Highlander author meets Donald Trump
30 Mar 2010
Tim Newark recently met Donald Trump who gave him a quote for Tim’s book Highlander ‘Great book. This is where I got my fighting spirit.”
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Interview with Andrew Lownie
30 Mar 2010
www.writers-clinic.webs.com have just published an interview with Andrew Lownie under the page Interviews - The Answers. http://durl.kr/dq57
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Daniel Tammet chosen as one of France's "most read" authors of 2009
26 Mar 2010
Congratulations to Daniel Tammet who has just been chosen as one of France’s “most read” authors of 2009 and had his photo taken with President Jacques Chirac and twenty of France’s leading writers, novelists and ‘academiciens’. More details at
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Baby X remains in Sunday Times Top Ten
21 Mar 2010
Harry Keeble and Kris Hollington’s Baby X remains for a sixth week in the top ten Sunday Times paperback bestseller list. Simon & Schuster have just comissioned a sequel.
