Blog Up For British Samuel Johnson Prize

An anonymous Iraqi woman has become the first blogger to be nominated for Britain's prestigious literary award the Samuel Johnson Prize. Under the pseudonym Riverbend, the 26 year old university student from Baghdad has been chronicling "three years of occupation and bloodshed" in Baghdad Burning since August 2003. The blog has been published in book form, but a spokeswoman for the £30,000 book prize said that there was nothing in the rules to disqualify non-fiction published "solely online, provided it was in English," according to a Times Online ariticle.

I'm really into books and book publishing as a whole, so news of a blog being considered noteworthy by the literary world was extremely interesting to me. While I was quite shocked initially due to the industry's tight reign on literary propriety and genres, with the creation of online books and such, I am not surprised that blogs are being looked at in a new light these days. I'm very excited to see what else is recognized; a merging of blog readers and book readers could be an exciting thing.