Monday, 15 April 2013

The Liebster Blog Award



A big thank you to Carla Nayland for giving The Bard’s Nest the Liebster (German for ‘favourite’) Blog Award!  



The rules of the Liebster Award are:

     Thank your Liebster Blog Award presenter on your blog and link back to the blogger who presented this award to you.
     Answer the 11 questions from the nominator, list 11 random facts about yourself and create 11 questions for your nominees.
     Present the Liebster Blog Award to 11 blogs of 200 followers or less who you feel deserve to be noticed and leave a comment on their blog letting them know they have been chosen.
     Copy and Paste the blog award on your blog


Here are my answers to Carla’s questions:

What's your favourite novel and what do you love about it?
-I generally find it hard to pick favourites of this sort, but I'll make an exception in this case: Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff, for the sheer power of the storytelling and the depth of emotion she conveys.  

Do you have any pet peeves in historical fiction?
-Excessive gadzookery. Historical inaccuracies that could have been easily prevented by checking in a book or, more recently, by just Googling phrases like 'did they have cucumbers in early medieval Britain?'    

What are you most proud of?
-In terms of something I've done? Probably the novel I finished a few years ago. (Now I just need to finish revising it...)

Your favourite and least favourite people in history?  (As few or as many as you like!)
-I do have a soft spot for Sir John Harington, Queen Elizabeth I's favourite godson, best known for inventing a flushing toilet (you can read more about him in my blog post here). I also like Henry IV of France for the fact that he seems to have been a capable ruler genuinely interested in the welfare of even his poorer subjects.
-Least favourite: A few too many to list…

The country, city or other place you'd most like to visit?
-There are a lot, so just picking one at random: Germany.

Which five people would you invite to your fantasy dinner party?
-Dumnorix (1st century BC anti-Roman Gaul); Cartimandua (1st century AD queen of the Brigantes); Vortigern (by tradition early medieval usurper and tyrant extraordinaire); Taliesin (6th century British bard) and Myrddin (the original Merlin, lived sometime in the 6th century). All shadowy figures – some viewed less positively than others – whose lives and times I’d like to know more about.

Facebook or Twitter or neither?
-Neither.

What's one of your goals for the future?
-To actually write the novel I'm currently researching...

What's your favourite season?
-I like all the seasons, as long as the weather isn't horrendous!

Dogs or cats or neither?
-Dogs, no contest. 

What's your favourite hobby?
-Writing, researching for writing, and reading fiction. Weaving and drawing. And walking in the countryside.


11 blogs I enjoy and think are well worth a visit:


I know several of these have already been nominated at least once; please feel free to take part as you choose and do as much or as little as you’d like.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for joining in! Sword at Sunset was one of my picks, too. Your dinner party would certainly have the potential to answer a lot of historical questions!

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    1. Thanks for giving me the opportunity. :) Yes, I noticed you picked Sword at Sunset as well - I wonder if anyone else did? It's certainly a classic. Without wanting to sound gushy, it's the only historical novel I've read so far (although my reading list is not, of course, exhaustive) that leaves me feeling both satisified (everything that happens seems somehow just right) and yet shattered (because 'if only'...) I've read other novels with a similar emotional depth, but not one that manages to pull off such a subtle balance between happiness and unhappiness. Anyway, enough of my waffle. ;) I'd hope that my diner party would have that potential, but given the reputations of at least some of the participants, one has to wonder whether they might just create a whole new set of questions! But I'm sure their answers would be interesting...and I could really do with Taliesin explicating a few of his poems. :P

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