Date: July 12, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
The Ugandan writer Monica Arac de Nyeko has been awarded the 2007 Caine Prize for her story “Jambula Tree”. The Caine Prize, awarded annually, was founded in 2000 to an African short story published in the English language. It is sometimes referred to as the “African Booker Prize”.
The winning work, a story about a lesbian relationship in a country where homosexuality is illegal, was described by the jury as “a witty and touching portrait of a community which is affected forever by a love which blossoms between two adolescents”.
While “Jambula Tree” remains unpublished or out of print in most English speaking countries, Ms Arac de Nyeko’s short story “Strange Fruit”, shortlisted for the 2004 Caine Prize, is available as part of the following selection:
Seventh Street Alchemy: A Selection of Writings from the Caine Prize for African Writing 2004
by Various
The 2004 winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, Brian Chikwava’s “Seventh Street Alchemy” is featured alongside shortlisted stories from 2004, compositions from the Caine Prize’s March 2005 Workshop for African Writers, and Charles Mungoshi’s previously unpublished “Letter from a Friend” in this inspired collection of work from some of Africa’s most promising young and new writers. …
You can read more about Seventh Street Alchemy: A Selection of Writings from the Caine Prize for African Writing 2004 at Amazon.com and Amazon.ca.
Date: July 7, 2007 | Discussion: 1 Comment
Alexis Wright has won the 2007 Miles Franklin Literary Award for her novel Carpentaria. The award, which celebrated its 50th year, was established by the Australian author Miles Franklin to annually award the best ‘published novel or play portraying Australian life in any of its phases’.
Carpentaria
by Alexis Wright
Carpentaria is Alexis Wright’s second novel, an epic set in the Gulf country of northwestern Queensland. The novel’s portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centres on the powerful Phantom family, leader of the Westend Pricklebush people, and its battles with old Joseph Midnight’s renegade Eastend mob on the one hand, and the white officials of Uptown and the neighbouring Gurfurrit mine on the other. Wright’s storytelling is operatic and surreal: a blend of myth and scripture, politics and farce. The novel teems with extraordinary characters - the outcast saviour Elias Smith, the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, the murderous mayor Bruiser, the moth-ridden Captain Nicoli Finn, the activist Will Phantom, and above all, the rulers of the family, the queen of the rubbish-dump and the fish-embalming king of time, Angel Day and Normal Phantom - figures of such an intense imagining, they stand like giants in this storm-swept world….
You can read more about Carpentaria at Amazon.com.
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.
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.
Date: June 11, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Winners of the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize have been announced. The International Award goes to Charles Wright for his Scar Tissue, while the Canadian Winner is Don McKay for Strike/Slip.
The C$100,000 poetry prize has been awarded annually since 2000, and aims to “serve and encourage excellence in poetry written in or translated into English anywhere in the world.”
INTERNATIONAL WINNER: Scar Tissue
by Charles Wright
In his new collection, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Wright investigates the tenuous relationship between description and actuality–”thing is not an image”–but also reaffirms the project of attempting to describe, to capture the natural world and the beings in it, although he reminds us that landscape is not his subject matter but his technique: that language was always his subject–language and “the ghost of god.” And in the dolomites, the clouds, stars, wind, and water that populate these poems, “something un-ordinary persists.”
You can read more about Scar Tissue at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
CANADIAN WINNER: Strike/Slip
by Don McKay
In this extraordinary collection from one of our most celebrated poets, Don McKay walks the strike-slip fault between poetry and landscape, sticks its strange nose into the cold silence of geologic time, meditates on marble, quartz and gneiss, and attends to the songs of ravens and thrushes and to the clamour of the industrialized bush. Behind these poems lies the urge to engage the tectonics of planetary dwelling with the rickety contraption of language, and to register the stress, sheer and strain — but also the astonishment — engendered by that necessary failure.
You can read more about Strike/Slip at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
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.
