Blogging chef whips up a Blooker

Blooker prize winner Julie Powell

The first Blooker prize, an award for the most literary blog-to-book conversion, has been won by 30 year-old American Julie Powell for a book based on her blog, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, One Tiny Apartment Kitchen. 

The book beat the British contender, Belle De Jour: Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, to the $2,000 prize, which the organisers hope will become as recognised as the Man Booker prize for fiction.

The winner also has a Booker connection; the author used to work for Peter Carey, the Australian writer who has twice won the Booker, once for Oscar and Lucinda in 1998 and again with The True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001.

Powell has been working as a nanny and secretarial temp while penning her blog, in which she tries to cook recipes from American cookery grande dame Julia Child in a cramped New York apartment over the course of a year.

"Too old for theatre, too young for children, and too bitter for anything else, Julie Powell was looking for a challenge," she writes.

"And in the Julie/Julia project she found it. Risking her marriage, her job and her cats' wellbeing, she has signed on for a deranged assignment: 365 days, 536 recipes, one girl and a crappy outer borough kitchen."

The book of the blog has sold over 100,000 copies, and a film is planned shortly.

"A great 'blook' is not a website shovelled onto paper," wrote Blooker committee judge Paul Jones in his blog. 

"Julie and Julia successfully makes the transition and grows as it goes having learned from the blog readers.

"The deeply personal story of an obsession leads us all to see what could be trivial and indulgent as a personal and, as it turns out, communal art; an art of transformation and of conquest, of egg dishes and of self-doubt."