Full disclosure, I’m a Norwich fan. But having had the pleasure of watching Grant Holt for three seasons now actually makes me more and more convinced that he could do a job for England this summer… if given the chance. I seriously doubt whether he will be, because Hodgson probably doesn’t need the grief from the press if he picks a ‘barrel chested former tyre fitter’ rather than someone who plays for one of the ‘big clubs’.

But beyond the fact that he is without doubt the most on-form striker in the English Premier League this season behind Wayne Rooney (and he can’t play for the first two games), what you’d always get from Holt is 100 per cent effort. Isn’t that what fans and the press have always argued that the England sides of the last ten years lack? And to those who say he wouldn’t be able to do it against the big sides, do Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal not count?

Anyway, just in case Hodgson needs reminding before he makes his final selection tomorrow, here’s five goals which prove that Holt isn’t just a battering ram forward. He’s an intelligent, skilful and intuitive battering ram forward…

1. He’ll convert crosses (vs Liverpool, October 11)

Ok, we’ll start with the traditional view of Holt: that he’s simply a big target man who lives on crosses. Fair enough. But his goal against Liverpool was not just a classic centre forward’s header, it showed incredible bravery, determination and desire to beat not just the defender but the onrushing goalkeeper too. Given the right service from England wingers, Holt could be a real threat – remember how Napoli basically collapsed when Chelsea tried this exact tactic in the Champions League.

2. He can score technically brilliant goals (vs Wolves, March 12)

Last season, I had the pleasure of seeing Holt score one of the most spectacular half-volleys I think I’ve ever seen; against Burnley the ball was bouncing almost waist-high but somehow he got his knee over it and speared a fantastic shot into the net from just outside the area. That was against Burnley, I know. But this season he showed icy nerve when bearing down on goal to lob the ball over the onrushing Hennessey and then head the ball into the empty net. It was genuinely Messi-esque. Even Chris Kamara said so…

3. He can be a fox in the box (vs QPR, November 11)

Defoe aside, there’s not really anyone in the current England squad who will do anything to squeeze the ball over the line. I’ve lost count of the times Holt has scrappily converted a half-chance – even the goal against Villa on Sunday was off his shoulder. But the best example of this was the winner against QPR last autumn. I’m still not sure whether he meant to head it, volley it, or indeed whether he actually headed or volleyed it. But the point is, it went in.

4. He makes great runs (vs Arsenal, May 2012)

Holt is actually a far more intelligent footballer than he’s given credit for. It’s not luck that he appears to be in the right place at the right time more often than not, he’s actually got much more pace and positional awareness than it at first appears. Take the goal at The Emirates earlier this month which put Norwich into the lead. Ok, the actual finish owed a lot to a deflection off Gibbs, but earlier in the move Holt flicked the ball onto Howson on the left hand flank. Seconds later, he’s sprinted 50 yards to pick the ball up on the right hand side of the area, and is readying himself for a shot. Not for long, I imagine, but there is actually a link to the video of this goal here

5. He can create goals for others (vs West Brom, January 12)

The final goal isn’t even one of Holt’s. Maybe because he’s done his time up front, Holt knows better than most what kind of service a fellow striker needs. He only has two assists this season, but I’d like to think that’s because his team-mates haven’t finished glorious chances more than anything else. But one of them sums up what Holt can do with the ball at his feet. Against West Brom Holt collected the ball in his own half  and actually passed it back to Naughton before peeling off his marker and sprinting down the left flank. One lovely pass from Naughton later and Holt was bearing down on the West Brom area. A quick look up and he provided the perfect chipped cross for Morison at the back post. One bullet header later, the Canaries were going home with three points.

So there you have it Roy. Picking Grant Holt isn’t a gamble. It’s the obvious choice.

It’s not the most high-profile of literary awards, but it must surely be the most esoteric. The Ondaatje Prize is awarded each year to the “book of the highest literary merit – fiction, non-fiction, poetry – evoking the spirit of a place”. This can mean almost anything can be nominated – last year’s winner was Edmund De Waal’s The Hare With The Amber Eyes (the Costa-winning book which investigated De Waal’s family history through his collection of Japanese netsuke). But Hisham Matar’s In The Country Of Men has also won in the past – a novel detailing the ordeal of a nine year old boy living in Tripoli.

I’d argue that all the best books should naturally “evoke the spirit of a place”, but I guess The Ondaatje Prize recognises writing in which location is as important as character or narrative. Anyway, one of the nominees this year certainly fits that bill. I reviewed Edgelands by Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley last February for Metro. It’s a non-fiction book which investigates what we consider “wild” in the United Kingdom, and finds a strange beauty in “allotments, railways, motorways and wasteland.”

Admittedly, sometimes it’s hard going; as I say in the review, it sometimes reads like the “lofty accompanying notes to a blustery audio-visual art installation about wasteland.” But overall it’s a lovely book to dip into when it feels like the world around you has become stultifyingly run-of-the-mill.

As usual, you can’t link to Metro’s book reviews online, so I’ve pasted the review in below. Edgelands is up against Rahul Bhattacharya’s debut novel, The Sly Company of People Who Care, Olivia Laing’s To the River, Teju Cole’s Open City, Julia Blackburn’s Thin Paths and Tim Robinson’s Connemara. Oddly, The Ondaatje Prize’s own website hasn’t posted such information yet, so if you do want to know more, head to The Guardian’s piece published yesterday.

Edgelands by Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley

Jonathan Cape, £12.99

Unloved business parks and canal tow-paths. Gravel pits and landfill sites. Any commuter will be passingly familiar with these wastelands, fleetingly glimpsed through train windows and unthinkingly driven past on the way to somewhere more important or traditionally “beautiful”. Symmons Roberts and Farley’s book, however, does more than just acknowledge these ignored places that are neither the city nor the countryside. It finds a strange, almost other-worldly beauty in them. After reading chapters on container parks or mobile phone masts, it’s unlikely you’ll ever look at overgrown buddleia in the same way again.

This is Edgelands. In much the same way that nature writer Robert Macfarlane argued a few years ago in The Wild Places that natural wonder isn’t always to be found in areas of outstanding beauty, Symmons Roberts and Farley encourage a reappraisal of the places we know, but have discarded as being unimportant. But they’re just as keen to emphasise the political and social history of these areas; growing up as they did in the North-West, there’s a really nice line on the exciting mystery of the post-industrial terrain.

Throughout, the writing (fashioned in one voice) is pin-sharp – as you might expect from two published poets – and every page contains a thought-provoking, nuanced image. In fact, it does sometimes fall into the trap of reading like the lofty accompanying notes to a blustery audio-visual art installation about wasteland. Neither is there a sense of a journey of discovery, just bitesize vignettes on whatever they find in the margins.

In a way, though, this fits the fractured make-up of our towns and cities. And while Edgelands is crying out for some photographs, perhaps that omission is deliberate too. It’s a book which begs us to use our imaginations, to appreciate what we pass by every day, but never really see.

Copy: The National, Gulf Life, Vision,  The Observer

This spring I’ve been busy with the International Prize For Arabic Fiction – colloquially known as the Arabic Booker - for a number of publications. First I spoke with one of the nominees, Ezzedine Choukri Fishere for Gulf Life, the inflight magazine of Gulf Air. I can’t link to the actual story, but you can read it here – it’s on page 20.

His nominated book, Embrace On Brooklyn Bridge seems ripe for translation, not least because it’s set in New York. Nevertheless, Fishere told me he still thought it was a Arab story, about “the challenges and difficulties of being an immigrant”. Hopefully the exposure from the nomination will find him a publisher in the English speaking world.

And that was the gist of my piece for Vision, which is a magazine promising “fresh perspectives from Dubai”. In the week of the prize (the ceremony is held in the UAE), I spoke to Ali Bader, who was longlisted in 2009 and 2010. “I have to say my experience with The Tobacco Keeper in 2009 was really amazing,” he told me. “Suddenly, the Arabic version was selling out everywhere. But then work began on the English translation, and there are French, German and Chinese versions to come. It’s lovely to think I might have a global audience!”

What’s encouraging about Bader’s experience is that he didn’t even win. But the publicity from being nominated was enough to encourage interest across the world – and sure enough the Kindle version of The Tobacco Keeper is available to download from Amazon now.

In the end, the prize was taken home by Rabee Jaber’s The Druze Of Belgrade, a historical novel set in 1860s Beirut, Belgrade and the Balkans. The ever excellent Arablit blog said he was a deserving winner so it’ll be fascinating to see how it turns out in English – the rights have already been signed up by New Directions.

Let’s hope we don’t have to wait two years – because that’s how long it’s taken Egyptian writer Youssef Ziedan’s prize-winning Azazeel to reach English bookshelves. I’m told the translation was actually completed a while ago so it seems bizarre that Atlantic sat on it for so long. Particularly because it’s a fascinating read: Ziedan is a deep thinker about the time in which he writes (the Middle East in the 5th century) and it was intriguing to talk to him in The National about the controversy the book has caused in his homeland. Members of The Coptic Church even filed lawsuits, so offended were they by depictions of an aggressive, pagan-purging Bishop Cyril.

“Judaism, Christianity, Islam – you can’t understand one without the other, and I wanted to try and explore how the past still works in the present,” he told me – which is probably the best reason for encouraging people to read Arabic fiction in translation: it’s a window into a world we know very little about beyond the headlines in the papers.

Still, everyone who I’ve spoken to in the past few months has been at pains to point out that the increase in interest in the literature from Arab world is great – but it will mean nothing long term if the work isn’t high quality. Which brings me to the review I wrote of Azazeel in The Observer. I had my misgivings, but generally, Ziedan’s book will last long after the focus has shifted somewhere else in the world.

It’s been a good Arab spring for literature.

Copy: Sports Illustrated, May 2012

Tonight, the annual bunfight to get into “the best league in the world” begins with the Championship playoffs. But, actually, how good is the Premier League? This is what I investigated for Sports Illustrated this month – I went to see Schalke play in Germany, spoke to Steve McClaren in Holland (who should know about European leagues, he’s managed in three of them), and a young English player in Spain who shunned advances from Premier League clubs to advance his football education at Atletico Madrid because he could “improve on technical and tactical skills.”

So what is the best league in Europe? Read the piece to find out – but it is telling that since this was published, both Spanish sides were of course knocked out of the Champions League and, after all the predictions that Premier League sides were being outwitted by their continental counterparts, Chelsea made it to the final. Perhaps, after those fantastic semi-finals, the best league in Europe is in fact, The Champions League.

Best League In Europe Click on the link here to read the full piece in PDF form.

Copy: Sports Illustrated, March 2012

>> Such are the vagaries of publishing deadlines that writing about Manchester City’s chances of winning the Premier League title in February was always likely to have an element of risk attached to it. Still, this week I was pretty pleased that the first line – “on 28 April, Manchester City play rivals United in what could be the fixture that decides the fate of the 2011/12 English Premier League” – still rang true. Although I still think City have a lot to do.

Anyway, the point of this, and the story, isn’t to boast about my powers of football prediction, and more to highlight that the speculation about Mancini’s future over the spring has been well wide of the mark. It took Sheikh Mansour to say that everyone was right behind him last week to douse the rumours down, but it was pretty apparent from the day I spent with Patrick Vieira, Brian Marwood et al that – surprisingly for a football operation owned by multimillionaires – they’re in it for the long game.

As Marwood said: “Everyone gets emotional about match day, understandably. But if you get drawn into continually reacting instantly after a game that hasn’t gone your way, you lose track of what you’re trying to do long term. I’m not saying for one moment that results and success aren’t important. But we’re very fortunate to have owners with a broader vision than getting carried away by one specific result.”

If you want to read the whole story click for the pdf here: Manchester_City

Copy: The National 13/03/12

>> CNN published an interesting story today on Saudi women. Entitled Pampered or Oppressed, it highlights the case of Samar Badawi, who served seven months in jail simply for disobeying her father. Earlier this month, she was given the 2012 International Women Of Courage Award by the US State Department – and rightly so. What’s fascinating in the article is that they also spoke to Rawda Al Youssef, who runs a campaign called “My Guardian Knows What’s Best For Me”. She argues that “the relationship between men and women inside the family is a complementary relationship and not an equal relationship.”

Which would clearly stick in the throat of most Western liberals. Even so, Badawi says, somewhat surprisingly: ”Our laws are fair, very fair,” she said. “If not for the law, I would not have been able to escape the difficult situation I was in. The problem is that there is no legal culture here. Women here, from various backgrounds, aren’t aware of their rights.”

So it’s been intriguing to come across some of those issues in a pretty mainstream debut novel by Keija Parssinen. Called The Ruins Of Us, the jacket doesn’t actually reflect the nuanced book that lies within: it somewhat sensationally trumpets “a sweeping novel of love and betrayal” that begins with a Saudi billionaire taking a second wife (his first is American). Parssinen, though, was born and grew up in Saudi – and although she can’t imagine living in what she calls a “stifling” society today, she spends a lot of time in the book exploring the culture clash from a Western and Saudi perspective, and also tries to explain that there are people with vastly opposing belief systems within the country

Anyway, it’s a really good first novel – not least because it’s a family drama as much as anything else, and it was interesting talking to her. As you’d expect, we ended up talking about Saudi’s future. Like everyone else, it seems, she’s not entirely sure:

“What should be done about it, I’m often asked. And it does feel that changes have to come from within the country for it to have any real meaning. The Saudis have to have ownership. Which is what has happened with the Arab Spring – but it takes time.”

Click here for the full interview with Keija Parssinen in The National

Copy: The National 07/03/12

>> Really fascinating to read that the highest-earning British musical act in the US last year wasn’t Adele. Or Coldplay. It was, incredibly, Sade. I genuinely don’t think I’ve heard anything by her since Your Love Is King. Or maybe I’m just snobbish.

Nice sax solo. Anyway, surely Sade’s success gives encouragement to Gabrielle, who hits the comeback trail this week with a gig in Dubai. I spoke to her about her career recently and there are striking similarities with Sade in that both have played the music industry on their own terms – recluses, in a way, who only return to the public eye when they have something to say. Or sing, rather.

Anyway, if ever there was a time for Gabrielle to make a comeback, it’s now. She has the high-profile endorsement from Adele, and it does feel a little like the climate is right for soulful music which pricks at the emotions. What I do know, now, is that Dreams is ‘inspired by’ Tracey Chapman’s Fast Car. Although I imagine at the time I was too busy listening to So Young by Suede.

Gabrielle – Dreams by UniversalMusicUK

Click here for the full interview with Gabrielle in The National

Copy: Creative Times 28/02/12

>> What pushed the Halle Orchestra, The Lowry and The Royal Exchange – three of Greater Manchester’s best arts organisations – together for the forthcoming production of Leonard Bernstein’s Wonderful Town? In this piece I wrote for Creative Times, the answers from the participating companies were surprisingly varied and ‘off message’.

Some believe working together was out of necessity as arts cuts began to bite. Some – including the director of the production – think it was a purely creative urge to come up with something as big and bold as possible. The Lowry, where Wonderful Town is to be staged before going out on tour, are more pragmatic: for them, collaborating with other venues, companies and institutions has always been a fact of their business, well before the current government came anywhere near power.

They’re all credible arguments. I’d also add in the more subtle effect of Manchester International Festival here. Say what you like about the programme, it has got arts organisations working together and thinking differently – in a way that perhaps they may not have done in the past.

But what was most interesting was the revelation that without the subsequent Wonderful Town UK tour, the production would have never got past the stage of the Halle’s Mark Elder and Royal Exchange’s Braham Murray thinking it was a nice idea. No matter how many tickets you sell, it seems, it won’t be enough to cover costs if it doesn’t get seen around the country. Which is why thinking big is, perhaps, the only way to succeed.

Click here for the full story on Wonderful Town in Creative Times

Copy: The National 27/02/12, Metro 19/02/12

>> Having been to Mauritius recently, I was fascinated to see how the Booker-nominated Sri Lankan author Romesh Gunesekera would approach a novel set on the island. His lasting impression was similar to my own – it’s a fascinating melting pot of cultures. And yet, incredibly, there’s no indigenous population wronged by colonialism here: before the first Dutch settlers discovered Mauritius, it had never been touched by human hand.

Which is not by any means to suggest that all the wrongs of colonialism weren’t played out here anyway; Gunesekera’s book, Prisoner Of Paradise, is set in the 1820s on an island riven by  slavery and inequality, and dependent on convict labour from India and Sri Lanka. Young Englishwoman Lucy Gladwell arrives on the island wide-eyed yet baffled by the restrictions and rules of society in her uncle’s plantation house. And as she gets to know Don Lambodar, a young, attractive translator from Ceylon, she also begins to understand the real Mauritius.

I also reviewed the book for Metro – see below. For all Gunesekera’s impressive ambition, he doesn’t quite pull the social history and the drama together in the way that the very best period writing manages. Still, he is wonderfully descriptive, and as someone who has witnessed the swaying sugar cane fields first hand, he took me right back.

The Prisoner Of Paradise by Romesh Gunesekera

Bloomsbury, £16.99

We’re well used to novels which explore the devastating effects of the slave trade. But the success of Toni Morrison and Andrea Levy’s work means the tendency is to look towards the Americas – which makes the focus of Booker-nominated’s Romesh Gunesekera’s fifth book all the more interesting. A trip to Mauritius prompted the Sri Lankan to look beyond honeymooning couples on pristine beaches and find a troubled history of injustice, inequality, convict labour and Indian slavery. This is the background to Prisoner Of Paradise – it’s 1825 and abolition is on the way – but the intrigue in the novel comes from a teenage Englishwoman in a plantation house and her slow-burn romance with a Ceylonese interpreter.

Combining such social history with the narrative of the girl’s desires is a tricky balancing act which Gunesekera doesn’t always pull off, and rather surprisingly, it develops into a classic Thomas Hardy plot rather than a book which says much new about slavery, racism or colonialism. But Gunesekera is a beautiful writer, wonderfully atmospheric and remarkably adept at conjuring a sense of place. And it’s definitely, in his eyes, not a paradise.

Click here to read the full interview with Romesh Gunesekera in The National

Copy: The National 26/02/12

>> For a while last year it seemed like everyone was reading David Nicholls’ One Day, the wonderful tale of two star-crossed university lovers who we happen across every year, on the same day, for 20 years. I must admit I came to it late – one of the perks/hazards of writing about and reviewing books is that you rarely read something that wasn’t sent in the post for you to form an opinion about. But it is a fantastic book, worthy of all the praise – and not worthy of a puny 107 minute film adaptation.

One Day, the film, did not meet most people’s expectations. It wasn’t just that Anne Hathaway’s accent wasn’t Yorkshire enough – it was also lacking what made the book so interesting. In fact, One Day isn’t really a romantic comedy – although it is in parts romantic (but cynically so) and comic. It’s more of a comment on nostalgia, the passing of time, on how we change but stay the same.

So it was interesting to talk to Nicholls about the film adaptation just ahead of his appearance at the Emirates Airline Festival Of Literature in Dubai next month. He would never say it was a failure, not least because he adapted it for the screen. But there was the sense that he regretted how much it was cut – he told me the original script was over two hours long. In the event, we only see eight of the 20 years that feature in the book.

Still, the book is always there. And if there is anyone left who hasn’t given in to its charms yet, I genuinely suggest you cast aside your cynicism for once and just enjoy a fabulously told story.

Click here for the interview with David Nicholls in The National.