The First Time

It's a bumper year for first-time published authors, says Catherine Lockerbie, director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival and one of the judges of the Orange Award for New Writers (won by Naomi Alderman for Disobedience). Ms Lockerbie writes: "Something remarkable is happening. Despite the impossibility of it all, writers are determined to write; readers are determined to read; publishers will publish and be damned; prizes and festivals which help support the primacy of powerfully good writing seem unafraid of the as yet undiscovered and untested," going on to cite the work of authors such as Yiyun Li and Olga Grushin as proof.