Blimey
14 May 2007. Inspired by a turn up for the book.
Fiction Winner: “The Doorbells Of Florence”
The winner of the Fiction category is “The Doorbells Of Florence”, a British blogger’s self-published book of photographs and stories, which had already been tipped by one critic to become “one of the cult books of the decade”.
Its author is Andrew Losowsky, 29, a British blogger, journalist and photographer now based in Madrid. His book comprises a collection of 36 colour photographs of Florentine doorbells, each accompanying a “strange story about the people and things that may or may not live inside”.
Since the photographs that inspired the stories were first posted on the photo-sharing website, Flickr, Losowsky bills it as the first volume of a new literary genre called “flicktion”, defined as fiction based on photographs. Losowsky self-published the resulting book on Lulu.com itself.
“The style is more Calvino than Dickens”, says Paul Jones, referring to Italo Calvino (1923-1985), the Italian writer known for quirky short stories written with a touch of fantasy: “Each image invokes a new tale related to the others in the collection only because they also come from pictures of similar objects in the same town and are written by the same author.”
UPDATE: Y per als lectors catalans...