Lucky Bunny chosen as Daily Telegraph Book fo the Year by Philip Hoare
'Lucky Bunny (Sceptre), Jill Dawson’s rip-roaring story of an East End girl made good by being defiantly bad; hilarious, poignant and exquisitely written.'
Jill Dawson nominated for the London Book Award 2012
The London Awards for Art and Performance is one of the country's most expansive awards, and recognises artists and performers across many art-forms. The London Awards are presented each year to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to their art form. Jill Dawson has been nominated in the books category for Lucky Bunny. The shortlist will be announced in June 2012.
Jill Dawson's new novel, Lucky Bunny, set in London in the 30s, 40s and 50s - and following the adventures of the accomplished thief, Queenie Dove - will be published by Sceptre in 2011.
Queenie Dove is a self-proclaimed 'genius' when it comes to thieving and survival. In Lucky Bunny she narrates her colourful life: born into a criminal family in the East End of London during the Depression, Queenie survives the Blitz and the Bethnal Green tube disaster to become an accomplished thief, trained by a group of women shop-lifters before moving on to more glamorous – and lucrative – crimes. Daring, clever and sexy, Queenie takes pride in outwitting the police and surviving on her wits. Despite attempting to go straight after the birth of her daughter, she’s tempted by the opportunity to take part in one last, audacious robbery.
Now optioned by the BBC as a three-part drama, Lucky Bunny will be published by Harper Collins in the USA in 2012
'Despite its surface thrills and spills and Krays era glamour, Lucky Bunny is a novel of great concern, human sympathy and seriousness. It is a novel of ideas and society, disguised as a romp. It never forgets the person behind the lipsticked and audacious self-creation that is 'Queenie Dove', whose real name we never learn. It deals with the consequences of poverty, the effects of violence, the attraction and risk of criminality and the forging of character through necessity and deprivation.'
-Bidisha's blog read the full review here
'A wonderfully evocative and moving story of love, danger and passionate intensity'
- Jake Arnott
'While some writers have a similar narrative tone from book to book, Jill Dawson reinvents herself each time while remaining recognisable. A spark fires throughout her work, giving life to narrators as various as a severely autistic boy in 19th-century France, the controversially executed "murderer" Edith Thompson, and war poet Rupert Brooke. Her new novel, and new narrator, may be her most likable yet.' - The Guardian read the full review here
'Jill Dawson is one of those writers so gifted and assured you relax just five words in. Take me anywhere you like, you say to the book. I’m in your hands.
Where Jill takes you here is down the old East End, through a horrid World War II childhood, a spell in jail and then the glamorous, but seedy underworld of the Fifties.
Admittedly, it doesn’t sound so lucky and heroine Queenie is no angel. But she’s resourceful, funny, brave and beautiful.
You’re on her side from that fifth word in I mentioned.' Wendy Holden - The Daily Mail
'Heart-rippingly painful and joyously playful. A major prize-winning contender.'
- Sainsbury's Magazine
'I'd imagine this year's Booker will be a shoo-in for Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child but as I haven't read it yet, I'm free to award my fantasy prize to Jill Dawson for Lucky Bunny. I adored the central character – a Mandy Rice-Davies confection with an even bigger heart – and have never come across an act of literary ventriloquism like it.'
- Polly Samson, author of Perfect Lives
'In her new and gloriously enjoyable novel [Dawson] invents a character so convincing that it’s hard to believe Queenie Dove is only a figment of the author’s imagination.' -
The Daily Telegraph read the full review here
'In Dawson's capable hands, thieving Queenie's story is far more than just crime caper. An award winning poet, Dawson shrewdly uses her heroine's undeniably clever but poorly educated point of view to evocative and sometimes lyrical effect, the author's use of language pure, simple and shimmering. The bar of luxury soap Queenie nicked for her Nan whom she lost in the crush at the shelter remains in a "little dish on her kitchen windowsill and she must have used it now and then, because it had a pattern on it of popped bubbles, which looked like lace". And the reason why her mother gets locked away in a prison hospital is both gruesome and mysterious, in a incident with the narrator's baby sister relayed with the imperfect understanding of a scared and hungry girl that is the stuff of haunting prose.' - The Scotsman read the full review here
Listen to an interview with Jill Dawson about Lucky Bunny on BBC Radio Four's Woman's Hourhere.
Lucky Bunny to be published in China by Hachette-Pheonix
The aquistions editor had this to say: ‘We have to say that it is no common title and we believe that its
originality has great potential on our market. Our editors really loved the intrigue as well as the dark and glamorous style...'
Monday 29th August, 2011 Jill Dawson appeared at the Voewood Festival ('The literary garden party of the year') alongside Polly Samson, author of Perfect Lives, and chaired by Damian Barr. She talked about her new novel Lucky Bunny.
Jill Dawson was invited to take part in the Galle Literary Festival in 2011. The trip was supported by the British Council
'My Galle festival experience was wonderful, Sri Lanka itself (my first visit) was enthralling. Everyone, from the Sri Lankan air stewardess in her kingfisher colours who greeted me at the airport with my name on a stick and whisked us through customs, to the tuktuk drivers who ferried us around the Galle Fort, to the Festival volunteers, were so friendly, calm and helpful. The Galle Festival programming was intelligent, ambitious and imaginative, and I loved the fact that for once, I was on a panel with three great writers who had much to say on the topics that interest me - you can't imagine how often I'm lumped together with writers I have nothing at all in common with, usually because we're all women and the programmers assume we'll have plenty to talk about. If that wasn't enough there was the location itself. The sea, the cocktail parties, the glamorous hotels, the generosity, the delicious food - (Felix is still going on about the lime basil sorbet he had at the Dutch House); the Sri Lankan wildlife - monkeys playing in the treetops while I gave my breakfast talk at the top of Lady Hill hotel, baby crocodiles on our river safari ....and can you believe it - to top all that we even saw a blue whale on our fabulous, unforgettable trip with ‘whalehead’ Phillip Hoare - well, it all adds up to one of the most memorable week's of my life, and definitely the best literary festival I've ever attended.'
Other news
Jill Dawson will talk about Lucky Bunny at Ways on the Water Literary Festival in the Lake District on Friday 9th March at 5pm and at the Oxford Literary Festival Tues 27th March 2012 at 10am.
Jill gave a talk for the Faber Academy February 26th 2011, and has been invited to the Charleston Literary Festival - 20th May, the Ubud Writers Festival, Indonesia October 5th - 9th 2011, and the Singapore Writers' Festival October 28th 2011.
Jill taught a Faber Academy course Perspectives on Fiction at Charleston, May 20th - 21st.
Jill appeared at WriteIdea, Bethnal Green library, Tues 16th November, 2010
Cherise Saywell has just signed her first two book deal. Cherise was mentored on the Gold Dust mentoring program, run by Jill Dawson.
Jill will be attending the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival in Indonesia for the second time in 2012.
April 2011: Jill Dawson has just been offered a two-book deal by her publisher, Sceptre, for two more novels.
Critically acclaimed - Jill Dawson's novel The Great Lover
...now published in America by Harper Collins in a PS edition
What do people know of the poet Rupert Brooke?
That W.B Yeats described him as ‘the handsomest young man in England’? That he was part of a circle that included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, the painter Augustus John, James and Lytton Strachey? That he died young, on his way to Gallipoli and was thereafter taken up as a national icon, the golden boy poet of the First World War? Or possibly only that he wrote the lines: ‘If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England…’
...proof that presently its author is one of the finest practitioners of the literary historical novel...and that this is her best novel yet. Siobhan Harvey, New Zealand Dominion Post
This captivating novel gives voice to Rupert Brooke himself in a tale of mutual fascination and inner turmoil, set at a time of great social unrest. Revealing a man far more complex and radical than legend suggests, it powerfully coveys the allure and curse of charisma. Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan Book Club
...a daring experiment, and one whose mood, setting and eccentricities linger in the mind. Joanna Briscoe, The Guardian
This brilliant, complicated man is the centre of Jill Dawson's The Great Lover, and while she draws extensively on historical records of Brooke and his contemporaries, it is her decisions as a novelist that make this account of his life fascinating as well as faithful. Helen Dunmore, The Times
Dawson has pulled off the risky gamble of reimagining history. The New Statesman
This is a seductive book, evocative and well paced, the tale split between Brooke and Nell, the two narrative voices strong, distinctive and consistent. Scotland on Sunday
The speed and rhythms of rural life, and the greater sense of the wider world of pre-war turbulence, of suffragettes laying siege to the status quo, and artists' coteries flouting convention – all this is rendered so unfussily, and in writing polished for clarity, not dazzling effect, that the reading becomes an almost physical pleasure. The Scotsman
Dawson has followed Brooke's lead, and her moving, intelligent, beautifully written and hugely enjoyable novel is alive with vivid descriptions of the world her characters inhabit. Peter Parker, Sunday Times
This is a compelling portrait of a failed love affair and of a damaged man who is so cut off from the world that, to paraphrase the book’s epigraph from DW Winnicott, he cannot allow himself to be found by those around him. Lorna Bradbury, Daily Telegraph
To translate this well-known figure into a novel, with all his contradictions, requires capacious knowledge and a gifted imagination. Fiction and fact are here blended with sureness and subtlety.
The Independent
Jill Dawson has created a convincing world of huge pathos; a subtle, evocative anti-fairy-tale of doomed youth by one of Britain's most subtle and accomplished writers. Waterstone's Books Quarterly
Dripping with deliciously sensual allsuions to beekeeping, this is an elegantly entwined story of self-discovery and wild, poetic love. Good Housekeeping
The Great Lover is not only engaging and seductive, it is also clever, witty and artfully designed. Times Literary Supplement
Nell is a wonderfully vivid creation: resilient, intelligent and heart-breakingly innocent, she represents the other, working-class England that often gets overlooked in accounts of 'giddy young people sleep-walking towards war' as Dawson puts it.
Dawson deftly works endless ironies into the gaps between these two narratives, and manages not only an impressive evocation of Brooke's milieu but a compelling reassessment of a poet often dismissed by modern readers as a poster boy for limp-wristed, tea-sipping Toyrism. Time Out
