This category of news covers literary prizes that award novels, as opposed to short stories, drama or poetry.
To see all the latest literary awards news, see the front page of The Burnt Ones: Literary Awards News.
Kesako Matsui awarded the Naoki Prize
Date: July 18, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Kesako Matsui has won the Naoki Prize, which is a one million yen prize recognizing the best Japanese popular literature by a young author. Like the Akutagawa Award, also the Naoki Prize was established in 1935, and is awarded twice a year.
Filed under Asian literature, Fiction, Novels, Winners, World literature
Tetsushi Suwa wins Akutagawa Prize
Date: July 17, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Tetsushi Suwa has won the Akutagawa Prize for his first novel Asatte no hito (”The person of the day after tomorrow”). The semiannual literary prize is one of Japan’s most prestigious book awards, and was established in 1935 in memory of Ryunosuke Akutagawa to celebrate new and rising talent.
Earlier this year Nanae Aoyama won the same prize for her novel Hitori Biyori.
Filed under Asian literature, Fiction, Novels, Winners, World literature
Per Petterson wins International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
Date: June 18, 2007 | Discussion: 2 Comments
Norwegian novelist Per Petterson has been awarded the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his novel Out Stealing Horses. The €100,000 award is the world’s largest literary prize for a single work of fiction published in English, and is chosen by a panel of international judges from a shortlist of over a hundred (this year 138) novels nominated by libraries from around the world.
Out Stealing Horses
by Per Petterson
Trond’s friend Jon often appeared at his doorstep with an adventure in mind for the two of them. But this morning was different. What began as a joy ride on “borrowed†horses ends with Jon falling into a strange trance of grief. Trond soon learns what befell Jon earlier that day—an incident that marks the beginning of a series of vital losses for both boys. Set in the easternmost region of Norway, Out Stealing Horses begins with an ending. Sixty-seven-year-old Trond has settled into a rustic cabin in an isolated area to live the rest of his life with a quiet deliberation. A meeting with his only neighbor, however, forces him to reflect on that fateful summer. …
You can read more about Out Stealing Horses at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Filed under English literature, European literature, Fiction, Novels, Winners, World literature
Chinua Achebe wins Man Booker International
Date: June 15, 2007 | Discussion: 1 Comment
The Nigerian novelist, poet and literary critic Chinua Achebe has won the 2007 Man Booker International Prize. The £60,000 prize is awarded once every two years to a living author, whose body of work “has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage”. This is the second time the award has been handed out, after Ismail Kadaré won it in 2005.
Achebe is probably best known for his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958) and the Booker Prize shortlisted Anthills of the Savannah (1987).
Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
One of Chinua Achebe’s many achievements in his acclaimed first novel, Things Fall Apart, is his relentlessly unsentimental rendering of Nigerian tribal life before and after the coming of colonialism. First published in 1958, just two years before Nigeria declared independence from Great Britain, the book eschews the obvious temptation of depicting pre-colonial life as a kind of Eden. Instead, Achebe sketches a world in which violence, war, and suffering exist, but are balanced by a strong sense of tradition, ritual, and social coherence. His Ibo protagonist, Okonkwo, is a self-made man. …
You can read more about Things Fall Apart at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Anthills of the Savannah
by Chinua Achebe
Chirs, Ikem and Beatrice are three like-minded friends working under the military regime of His Excellency, the Sandhurst-educated president of Kangan. In the pressurized atmosphere, they are simply trying to live and love - and remain friends. …
You can read more about Anthills of the Savannah at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Filed under African literature, English literature, Fiction, Lifetime awards, Novels, Poetry, Winners, World literature
Adichie wins Orange Prize For Fiction
Date: June 11, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has won the 2007 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, a £30,000 award given annually for the best English-language novel by a female author of any nationality. This was the 12th time the award was handed out.
Half of a Yellow Sun
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This highly anticipated novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood. The three main characters in the novel are swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer’s house. The other is a young middle-class woman, Olanna, who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. And the third is a white man, a writer who lives in Nigeria for no clear reason, and who falls in love with Olanna’s twin sister, a remote and enigmatic character. As these people’s lives intersect, they have to question their own responses to the unfolding political events. This extraordinary novel is about Africa in a wider sense: about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race; and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these things.
You can read more about Half of a Yellow Sun at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Filed under African literature, English literature, Fiction, Novels, Winners, World literature
Commonwealth Writers’ Prize winners announced
Date: May 30, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
The 2007 overall winners of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize have been announced. The £10,000 award for the overall Best Book and the £5,000 for the Best First Book were chosen from the eight regional winners selected earlier this year.
This year’s winners are:
BEST BOOK: Mister Pip
by Lloyd Jones
On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens’s classic Great Expectations. …
You can read more about Mister Pip at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
BEST FIRST BOOK: Vandal Love
by D.Y. Béchard
A family curse – a genetic trick resulting from centuries of hardship – causes the Hervé children to be born either giants or runts. An astonishing novel, Vandal Love follows generations of this unique French-Canadian family across North America, and through the twentieth century, as they struggle to find their place in the world. …
You can read more about Vandal Love at Amazon.com and Amazon.ca.