Commonwealth Writers' Prize + Man Asian rules changed

Commonealth Writers Prize: shortlist for regional winners has been announced. I'm happy for Albert Wendt in the South East Asia and Pacific region. He's a Samoan writers who also works and writes in New Zealand. I read a couple of hi short stories and they were really good. When I have time, I will browse the web looking for plots and interesting books...

Africa
The shortlisted writers for Africa's Best Book are:
Trespass by Dawn Garisch (South Africa)
The Double Crown by Marié Heese (South Africa)
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria)
Eyo by Abidemi Sanusi (Nigeria)
Tsamma Season by Rosemund Handler (South Africa)
Refuge by Andrew Brown (South Africa)
Kings of the Water by Mark Behr (South Africa)

The shortlisted writers for Africa's Best First Book are:
I Do Not Come to You by Chance by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani (Nigeria)
The Shape of Him by Gill Schierhout (South Africa)
The Shadow of a Smile by Kachi Ozumba (Nigeria)
Come Sunday by Isla Morley (South Africa)
Sleepers Wake by Alistair Morgan (South Africa)
Jelly Dog Days by Erica Emdon (South Africa)
Harmattan Rain by Aysha Harunna Attah (Ghana)

Caribbean and Canada
The shortlisted writers or the Caribbean and Canada Best Book are:
The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels (Canada)
February by Lisa Moore (Canada)
Euphoria by Connie Gault (Canada)
Goya's Dog by Damian Tarnopolsky (Canada)
Galore by Michael Crummey (Canada)
The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon (Canada)

The shortlisted writers for the Caribbean and Canada Best First Book are:
Under this Unbroken Sky by Shandi Mitchell (Canada)
Daniel O'Thunder by Ian Weir (Canada)
The Island Quintet: Five Stories by Raymond Ramcharitar (Trinidad)
Diary of Interrupted Days by Dragan Todorovic (Canada)
The Briss by Michael Tregebov (Canada)
Amphibian by Carla Gunn (Canada)


South Asia and Europe
The shortlisted writers for South Asia and Europe Best Book are:
Solo by Rana Dasgupta (Britain)
For Pepper and Christ: A Novel by Keki Daruwalla (India)
The Beijing of Possibilities by Jonathan Tel (Britain)
Heartland by Anthony Catwright (Britain)
Another Gulmohar Tree by Aamer Hussein (Pakistan)
The Immortals by Amit Chaudhuri (India)

The shortlisted writers for South Asia and Europe Best First Book are:
The Hungry Ghosts by Anne Berry (Britain)
Arzee the Dwarf by Chandrahas Choudhury (India)
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Pakistan)
Among Thieves by Mez Packer (Britain)
An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay (Britain)
Tail of the Blue Bird by Nii Parkes (Britain)


South East Asia and Pacific
The shortlisted writers for South East Asia and Pacific Best Book are:
Summertime by J.M Coetzee (Australia)
A Good Land by Nada Awar Jarrar (Australia)
The Adventures of Vela by Albert Wendt (Samoa)
Singularity by Charlotte Grimshaw (New Zealand)
The People's Train by Thomas Keneally (Australia)
Parrot and Oliver in America by Peter Carey (Australia)

The shortlisted writers for South East Asia and Pacific Best First Book are:
The Ice Age by Kirsten Reed (Australia)
After the fire, a still small voice by Evie Wyld (Australia)
Look Who's Morphing by Tom Cho (Australia)
Document Z by Andrew Croome (Australia)
Come Inside by Glenys Osborne (Australia)
Siddon Rock by Glenda Guest (Australia)


Do yo remember the Man Asian Literary Prize? I wrote about it a few times. It’s supposed to help English-speaking readers to discovers Asian literature, promoting books unpublished in English, which means that they might have written in another language, let’s say Chinese or Thai.
Great thing, except that now the rules have changed. A blogger friend from Malaysia, Sharon of Bibliobibuli, wrote about it with more details. Well, to sum it up now the prize is opened only to novels first published in English in 2010… so forget about those countries whose literature you wanted to get your hands to. No more Vietnam or Myanmar, Sharon says.

Guardian's First Book Award 2009 - shortlist

• The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey (UK): also shortlisted for the Orange Prize and longlisted for the Booker Prize, it’s the story of an architect whose memories are being lost because of Alzheimer.
• The Selected Works of TS Spivet by Reif Larsen (USA): About a genius 12-year-old cartographer from Montana. Much of its story is told in the maps and diagrams supposedly drawn in the margins by Spivet.
• The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton (New Zealand): two linked narrative threads, one set in a girls' school in the aftermath of a pupil-teacher affair and the other in a drama school where details of the affair are used for the end-of-year production.
• An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah (Zimbabwe): 13 short stories that show different aspects of Zimbabwean life from the shanty towns to the mansions but which also have universal resonances such as betrayal.
• A Swamp Full of Dollars by Michael Peel: the chaotic story of Nigeria and its oil written by a corrispondent of the Financial Times.

Last year’s winner was a non-fiction book, Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise (read this post). Mark Brown, The Guardian’s art correspondent, claims that in this year’s shortlist, fiction is resurgent.

Note:

The Guardian First Book Award is open to all first-time authors writing in English, or translated into English, across all genres.
The fact that, for the sake of diversity, there should be some non-fiction books, at least a collection of short stories or a poetry book is always underlined by the commentators of the shortlist. The fact that every now and then there should be a translated book in the shortlist is never mentioned. I wonder if some translated books enter the competition at all and if the jury (usually very British) even takes them in some consideration.

For the longlist of this year’s Guardian First Book Award, click here.

For posts covering last year’s award, click here and here.

By the way, this month the Guardian book culb has Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss as its choice! Click here to read how much Sam Jordison struggled with this novel and here to read John Mullan talking about divisions in the novel.

Herta Müller has won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature

As I did last year, when French author Le Clézio won the Prize, I scratched my head and said: “Uh?”. While all the world is congratulating the President of the United States of America for being awarded, quite unexpectedly, the Nobel Prize for Peace, yet another time the Nobel Prize for Literature has been won by a not-exactly-well-known author, Herta Müller.

So I read something about her life and works and surfed the web for some reactions to the prize. Here’s what I found out:

Herta Müller is a Romanian-born German novelist, only the 12th woman to win the prize in 108 years. Some people have ironically noticed that she fits into the criteria chosen by the Nobel Prize judges: she comes from a bicultural/ethnic minority background and she often writes about hard life in a totalitarian regime. Many think that recently the Nobel Prize for Literature seems to put political considerations ahead of literary merit. The criticism comes from the observation that many recent laureates are from ethnic or linguistic minorities (Le Clézio, Jelinek, Kertész, Gao and Szymborska) and therefore write about the political or social oppression that comes from this condition.

Herta Müller was born in the once Austro-Hungarian province of Banat, now part of Romania, and is therefore a part of the German minority of Romania. She writes, of course, about Ceauşescu’s communist regime: Herta Müller was in fact dismissed from her job because she didn’t want to cooperate with the Romanian secret police, moving to Germany in 1987 as a result of threats by the communists. The traumas of being in exile in her own country, Romania, and of being a minority in an oppressive communist regime have great influence on her works.

Unfortunately, only five of her works are translated into English and even in Germany she is not well known. Her masterpiece is considered to be Herztier, published in English as The Land of Green Plums: in Romania at the height of Ceausescu's reign, several young people leave the impoverished provinces for the city in search of better prospects, but they must face betrayal, suicide, and the reality that even the strongest must bend to the oppressors or resist and die. Other important works are The Appointment, about a young woman working in a clothes factory during Ceausescu's regime and The Passport (here’s a link with an extract), the story of a village miller in a German-speaking village in Romania, who applies for permission to emigrate to West Germany.

Reading the reactions to this award, I gather that everybody who has read her books agree that she is an exceptional writer, but the point of debate is more the meaning of this prize for the literary world, as if the commettee was trying to send a message. Similar polemics and observations arouse last year when JMG Le Clézio, also little known outside of France, won the prize (here’s a link to my post on the topic).

The Guardian reports that “Pete Ayrton, who has published Müller in translation at Serpent's Tail, said he was ‘absolutely thrilled’ at the news. "It's terrific and I think it shows the Nobel prize are doing their job to bring the writings of wonderful, neglected writers, who are underappreciated in the Anglo Saxon world, to our attention" he said.”

Two book bloggers, also of The Guardian, reflect on the award. Marting Chalmers in “Why Herta Müller Matters” writes: “It is once again challenging the self-satisfied Anglo-centrism of the English-language publishing business, with its rather narrow definitions of what constitutes good writing, and it is widening our ideas of Europe. And it is perhaps in its failure to engage with European literatures that the English culture, for all the advantages of the global reach of the English language, shows itself at its most provincial.”

It is very selfish and imperialistic to think that the judges were thinking of sending a message only to the Anglo Saxon book business, rather than to the whole literary world. Richard Lea is less "anglocentric" and, even admitting that he’s not an expert on Ngugi Wa Thiong’o or any other non-European writer, he thinks that the Swedish Committee is “running a European Club” and actually, if you read the list of recent winners, you only find writers who are not that far away from Sweden: JMG Le Clézio (France), Harold Pinter (England), Orhan Pamuk (Turkey, almost Europe), Elfriede Jelinek (Austria), Imre Kertész (Hungary) and Günter Grass (Germany).

Memole says: I don't know what to think. It's good that they are encouraging European literatures and that they don't stick to British/American authors, but it's also true that they could open their minds and give the award to an Asian or African writer, there are so many. On the other hand, I'm afraid that in 20 years' time we will be musing over the fact that Philip Roth or Amos Oz didn't receive the prize (the writer must be alive to be eligible), as we do now with Virginia Woolf or James Joyce. It seems to me that the judges decided to award the prize to a writer who's from an ethnic or linguistic minority, who suffered the injusticies of Nazism or Communism or any other dictatorship, fought against it and wrote about it, who's European but not British, better if from the new members of the European Union, who's a woman, who's not translated enought into English... and only after that agreed that the only writer who answers these characteristics is Herta Müller.

Here's a link to an article of the New York Times with more excerpts from Herta Müller's works.

L’unico suo libro disponibile in italiano è Il Paese delle Prugne Verdi. Sono stati pubblicati altri due dei suoi libri: Bassure, nel 1987, e In Viaggio Su Una Gamba Sola, nel 1992, entrambi ora fuori catalogo. Lei era anche presente al Festivaletteratura di Mantova (qui un link ad un articolo tratto da Il Corriere della Sera).

Hilary Mantel wins Man Booker Prize 2009

The winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize has been announced: it’s Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.
No surprise, it was this year’s favourite. She has beaten excellent writers such as A.S. Byatt and J.M. Coetzee (the favourite in my poll!).
I have never read a novel by Hilary Mantel and I didn’t know her name before reading about her nomination, but apparently she has written ten novels before this one. It’s sad when an author is awarded such an important prize and you had never heard of her/him or read one of his/her books. Wait for the next post on the Nobel Prize for Literature and you'll have the same reaction you had last year: uh?

Wolf Hall is a piece of historical fiction (most books in the shortlist were) concerning Thomas Cromwell, an adviser of King Henry VIII. It’s not exactly a quick read, the hard back being exactly 672 pages long, but most people who have read it think it’s really worth it.

James Naughtie, chair of judges said :

Hilary Mantel has given us a thoroughly modern novel set in the 16th century. Wolf Hall has a vast narrative sweep that gleams on every page with luminous and mesmerising detail. ... It probes the mysteries of power by examining and describing the meticulous dealings in Henry VIII's court, revealing in thrilling prose how politics and history is made by men and women. ... In the words of Mantel's Thomas Cromwell, whose story this is, "the fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes."

Read a review by a blogger friend, Asylum.

Other posts on this year's Man Booker Prize: longlist and comment (here) and shortlist and comment (here). On last year's Booker Prize, won by Araving Adiga's The White Tiger, here and here.

By the way, Not the Booker Prize, the competition created by Sam Jordison of The Guardian has been won by Rana Dasgupta’s Solo. I don’t know if he’s a good fiction writer (yes, it’s a man!) but I’ve read some of his articles published in English newspapers and he seems to be pretty good at writing.

Not the Booker Prize

NOT THE BOOKER PRIZE (see this post), an alternative to the Booker Prize, created by Sam Jordison, a blogger of The Guardian. Since the process of finding the six books for the shortlist was simply by leaving a comment on the blog with the title of the book, some books arrived on the shortlist by strange means. The winner will be announced in a few days, together with the Booker Prize. The shortlisted titles are:

Rana Dasgupta – Solo (review and extract)
Solo recounts the life and daydreams of a reclusive one hundred year-old man from Bulgaria.

James Palumbo – Tomas (review and extract)
Tomas tears apart the world of the rich on his crusade against everything that's wrong with the 21st Century, including fat bankers and reality TV.

Eleanor Thom – The Tin Kin (review and extract)
When her aunt Shirley dies, Dawn finds herself back in her claustrophobic home town in Northern Scotland for the first time in years. She spends her days caring for her small daughter, listening to tapes of old country songs and cleaning Shirley s flat, until one day she comes across the key to a cupboard that she was forbidden to open as a child. Inside she finds an album of photographs, curling with age.

Simon Crump – Neverland: the unreal Michael Jackson story (review and extract)
This is a collection of interlinked short stories, interwoven against the constant presence of a certain Mr Michael Jackson. Is it the Jackson that you automatically think of? That's clearly for you to decide.

MJ Hyland – This is how (review and extract)
When his fiancé breaks off their engagement, Patrick Oxtoby leaves home and moves into a boarding house in a remote seaside town. But in spite of his hopes and determination to build a better life, nothing goes to plan and Patrick is soon driven to take a desperate and chilling course of action.

Jenn Ashworth – A Kind of Intimacy (review and extract)
Annie is morbidly obese, lonely and hopeful. She narrates her own increasingly bizarre attempts to ingratiate herself with her new neighbours, learn from past mistakes and achieve a "certain kind of intimacy" with the boy next door.

By the way...

Recently I learned from the comments that I'm not the only person who hardly buys any hardback novel. Read this article from The Times Online, about the 50 paperbacks of 2009. What is most interesting is not the list of paperbacks, but the history of this format (by Nicholas Clee).

Here's an interesting article on the similarities between Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly (main character of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, become famous for the interpretation by Audrey Hepburn, read my review) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby (unforgettable protagonist of The Great Gatsby, read my review): Is Holly Golightly The Great Gatsby in Drag? In fact, in my mind the two novels are somehow interweaved, maybe because I read them at a short distance of time one from the other.

For lovers of India, the new book by William Dalrymple: Nine Lives: in Search of the Sacred in Modern India (read here).

in the picture: La Lecture (Woman Reading) by Pablo Picasso

Booker Prize Shortlist 2009

In any Anglophone country around the world, from Ireland to New Zealand, every year, at about this time, people rush to the local bookshop or library in order to put their hands on the books shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

But I am in Italy and people are scarcely aware that a few days ago Margaret Mazzantini won the Campiello Prize with her Venuto al Mondo (why don’t people read in a country with so many art lovers and defenders of Italian culture and history?).

So here’s the Booker Prize shortlist (with a short synopsis taken from The Guardian website):

A.S. Byatt – The Children’s Book
It deals with intertwined lives of four families at the turn of the 20th century as they experiment with bohemian living, each with their own secrets.

J.M. Coetzee – Summertime
This book completes his trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood and Youth, detailing the story of a young English biographer who is writing a book about the late author John Coetzee. Coetzee has already won the Booker Prize twice (for Life and Times of Michael K and Disgrace) and he would be the first author to win for the third time.

Adam Foulds – The Quickening Maze
A historical reconstruction of the meeting of the poets John Clare and Alfred Tennyson at a lunatic asylum in Epping Forest.

Hilary Mantel – Wolf Hall
A piece of historical fiction centring on Thomas Cromwell, who was the successor to Cardinal Wolsey as Henry VIII’s most trusted adviser as the king tries to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. She’s the favourite, according to the critic, the bloggers and the odds (English people love betting on everything, didn’t you know?).

Simon Mawer – The Glass Room
An historical novel set in Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s. As war looms, newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer, a Jew married to a gentile, move to a house on a hill with a unique glass room.

Sarah Waters – The Little Strangers
A ghost story set in post-war, rural Warwickshire. She’s the favourite at the tills!

BROWSING THE WEB FOR MORE INFO AND THOUGHTS:

• Jonathan Ruppin of Independent book chain Foyles says: “It's noticeable that this year the majority of writers in contention all have a few books to their names already, which perhaps underlines the fact that most outstanding authors are like vintage wines, developing a fuller, richer appeal as their careers progress”. No flash in the pan, then! Arifa Akbar of The Independent also notes that “The shortlist was very different from last year’s selection which included two debut novelists, one of whom, Aravind Adiga, won with The White Tiger”.


• Another commentator, in an audio interview , notes that all the titles, with the exception of Coetzee’s novel, are historical fiction, what the Germans would call “faction” (!). Erica Wagner of The Times tries to explain why in this article.


• The surprise is maybe that Tolm Cóibín’s Brooklyn didn’t make it to the shortlist (it’s the only book I saw in translation in Italian bookshops so far and I was tempted to buy it) and William Trevor neither. Also, I take note that those have been shortlisted but never won are called “bridesmaids” (at least in some articles of The Guardian), because they always attend the wedding but they are never the spouse. Isn’t it a slightly cruel nickname?


• Jim Naughtie (what a surname!), a BBC broadcaster and this year chair of the judges, said that there were quite a few bad books among the big names that entered the prize. "Just because you are an accomplished writer with a great reputation it does not mean you can't write a bad book”. People exluded from the Booker race this year: John Banville, Thomas Keneally, Anita Brookner, Penelope Lively, Kazuo Ishiguro and Margaret Atwood (according to the article). So at least one of these has written a bad book this year!

More to come on the Not the Booker prize, remember what a journalist said about the books on the Booker shortlist? They're always about postcolonial guilt (not this year, babe), Irish famine (nope) or English middle-class Islingtonians having Terribly Important Thoughts about their boring love lives (are they?).

The Guardian's First Book Award - Longlist

The Guardian’s First Book Award, which had A Case of Exploding Mangoes (my review) and A Fraction of the Whole (my review) only shortlisted last year, is back again. The idea of having fiction and non-fiction, prose and poetry competing for the same prize is a bit weird, but here you go:

Fiction

The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton (novel)
The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey (novel) Also longlisted for the Booker Prize!
The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw (novel)
The Selected Works of TS Spivet by Reif Larsen (novel)
An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah (Collection of short stories) Set in Zimbabwe!

The Missing by Siân Hughes (Poetry)

Non-fiction

The Secret Lives of Buildings by Edward Hollis
Direct Red. A Surgeon’s Story by Gabriel Weston

The Strangest Man. The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, the Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo

A Swamp Full of Dollars. Pipelines and Paramilitaries at Nigeria’s Oil Frontier by Michael Peel

A Previous Winner (2007): Children of the Revolution by Dinaw Mengestu (my review)

Man Asian Literary Prize - Longlist

If you’re tired of this year’s glaringly white Man Something Else List (as Margaret Howie from Bookslut writes in her blog):

With a Stone in My Heart - Gopilal Acharya (Bhutan)
Jimmy the Terrorist - Omair Ahmand (India)
Say Scholar - Siddharth Chowdhury (India)
Witness the Night - Kishwar Desai (India)
The Descartes Highlands - Eric Gamalinda (Philippines)
The Last Gods of Indochine - Samuel Ferrer (Hong Kong)
Rough with the Smooth - Ram Govarhan (India)
History of Hate - Kanishka Gupta (India)
Memoirs of a Terrorist - Kamaroon Rasheed Ismeer (UAE)
Overwinter - Ratika Kapur (India)
The Bereavement of Agnes Desmoulins - Mariam Karim (India)
The Autobiography of a Mad Nation - Sriram Karri (India)
Residue - Nitasha Kaul (India)
Leche - R. Zamora Linmark (Philippines)
Secrets of the Eighteen Mansions - Mario I. Miclat (Philippines)
Different Countries - Clarissa V. Militante (Philippines)
Omigod - Varuna Mohite (India)
Thunder Demons - Dipika Mukherjee (India)
Blackland - Hena Pillai (India)
Lin Xiu-Tzi and Her Family - Roan Ching-yueh (Taiwan)
Eight Muses of the Fall - Edgar Calabia Samar (Philippines)
Table of Four – K. Srilata (India)
The Boat to Redemption - Su Tong (China)
Shadow of the Red Star - Oyungerel Tsedevamba (Mongolia)

I hope that at least one or two of these books will be acknowledged in Europe, because I must admit that I'm bored with this year's Man Booker Prize longlist.

Man Booker Prize 2009 - Longlist

So here we are again with the best of 2009 according to the Booker Prize judges.

A.S. Byatt – The Children’s Book (UK)
J.M. Coetzee – Summertime (South Africa / Australia)
Adam Foulds – The Quickening Maze (UK)
Sarah Hall – How to Paint a Dead Man (UK)
Samantha Harvey – The Wilderness (UK)
James Lever – Me Cheeta (UK)
Hilary Mantel – Wolf Hall (UK)
Simon Mawer – The Glass Room (UK)
Ed O’Loughlin – Not Untrue & Not Unkind (Ireland)
James Scudamore – Heliopolis (UK)
Colm Toibin – Brooklyn (Ireland)
William Trevor – Love and Summer (Ireland)
Sarah Waters – The Little Strangers (UK)

Here for plots and more information

Thoughts:

Every year someone's left out (last year it happened to Kureishi for example and this year to Margaret Atwood, John Banville, Thomas Keneally and Penelope Lively). Every year they throw in a wild card that is unlikely to win (Child 44 last year and Me Cheeta this year).

The real surprise this year is that they didn't spread their choices all over the Commonwealth, but stayed in the British Isles (apart from Coetzee, whose book is yet to be published, by the way). Come on, no Asian writers? Last year there were three, plus Michelle de Kretser who was born in Sri Lanka but moved to Australia when she was 14. I guess it's now obvious that there are two many restrictions to this prize: no American authors and no books of short stories (so Ishiguro and Adichie were not eligible, what a pity).

What I find hilarious is that I am into contemporary English Lit and I know only 3 writers (Byatt, Toibin and Coetzee) and I've only read something from the latter, who's 3/1 favourite to win the prize (and has already won twice I think)!

The Guardian has announced he's awarding the "Not the Booker Prize Prize" (read here), remarking that "the books are always about post-colonial guilt, Irish poverty or English middle-class Islingtonians having Terribly Important Thoughts about their boring love lives". Gosh, that's kinda true...

Some more literary news!

* The Guardian, which had completely forgotten about Kamala Das's death (!), has made up for it with an obituary (here). From the article I learn that she wrote an autobiography in which there is much fiction, a book that could be described as a "biomythography". I wish I knew this word or Das's memoirs when I wrote my graduation thesis on Janet Frame's Autobiography! Now I want to read this book, it sounds so interesting (it must be all about freeing herself from domestic and sexual oppression).

* Marilynne Robinson's Home has won the Orange Prize for Fiction. It was quite expected, as everyone who read all the novels shortlisted for the prize agreed (here the reviews of a blogger friend, Lizzy). When I chose from the plots which books I'd like to read (here and here) I didn't consider Home, but other titles (for example Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction youth panel's award, anyway). Well, I don't know, I might give Home a try after all!

* Here's an interesting interview with Helen Oyeyemi, the young author of a novel called White is for Witching. The novel involves ghost stories, gothic literature (Edgar Allan Poe, Dracula, Wuthering Heights etc.) and Caribbean and Nigerian supernatural traditions. Very, very interesting. Oyeyemi is a British writer of Nigerian origin, but she is also interested in the Caribbean region (her second novel The Opposite House is about the Cuban Santeria religion!). Here's the link.

Dreaming of an international world of literature

* Canadian author Alice Munro wins Man Booker International Prize. She's considered one of the best short story writers of our time. I've never read anything she has written, what a shame... This was the short list: I wonder why the prize was given yet another time to an Anglophone writer (the previous winner was Chinua Achebe) if the prize is meant to be international, which means that writers of every language are eligible and not only those who write in English. My hope was Vargas Llosa (wonderful writer!) or Antonio Tabucchi (for mere nationalistic reasons). I'm beginning to be more and more fed up with these pretenses by anglophone writers and critics that only fiction originally written in English is worth reading. Of course I love the English language and a great lot of anglophone writers, but I would appreciate some more consideration for other literatures!

A post in Italian on Canadian authors (Che libro fa in Canada)

* I missed out on the Pulitzer Prize, maybe because I was in the UK and it was hardly in the news. Winner for fiction: Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout, a collection of 13 short stories set in small-town Maine. Never heard of. For some reason the prospect of reading short stories set in "small-town Maine" makes me feel like I'm in "Murder she wrote"...
Other finalists: The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich, a haunting novel that explores racial discord, loss of land and changing fortunes in a corner of North Dakota where Native Americans and whites share a tangled history; and All Souls by Christine Schutt, a memorable novel that focuses on the senior class at an exclusive all-girl Manhattan prep school where a beloved student battles a rare cancer, fiercely honest, carefully observed and subtly rendered. [from http://www.pulitzer.org/]
Drama: Ruined by Lynn Nottage
Poetry: The Shadow of Sirius by W. S. Merwin

I guess that these all-American books and authors are not very famous in Europe and they're not given any space in the news. Somehow I feel as if there was a wall that separates the two sides of the Atlantic...

Orange Prize for Fiction 2009 shortlist

I wrote about the Orange Prize for Fiction some time ago (here). Now the shortlist's out:

Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman (USA)

The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey (UK)

The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt (USA)

Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden (Ireland)

Home by Marilynne Robinson (USA)

Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie (Pakistan)

Three Americans! And people say (read the Nobel Prize judges) that American literature is dead. I wonder if those books are really good or just decent. The two books from the shortlist that I long to read are Scottsboro and Burnt Shadows (review here) but in the longlist there were other books that I thought interesting. And by the way, why on earth isn't Nobel-prize winner Toni Morrison on the shortlist? In the past month I've read about her A Mercy a lot more than everything else on the shortlist (of some novels and authors I had never heard the name, but the prize is supposed to support women writers, isn't it?).

I'm giving you some of the plots choosing what I think could be interesting both in shortlist and longlist (from http://www.orangeprize.co.uk/). I realize it's mostly postcolonial stuff that I'm interested in, but you must already now my taste by now...

From the shortlist:
Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman (USA)
Alabama, 1931. A posse stops a freight train and arrests nine black youths. Their crime: fighting with white boys. Then two white girls emerge from another freight car, and fast as anyone can say Jim Crow, the cry of rape goes up. One of the girls sticks to her story. The other changes her tune, time and time again. A young journalist, whose only connection to the incident is her overheated social conscience, fights to save the nine youths from the electric chair, redeem the girl who repents her lie, and make amends for her own past.

Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie (Pakistan)
In a prison cell in the US, a man stands trembling, naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantánamo Bay. How did it come to this?
August 9th 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, taking in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one, in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss.
In a split second, the world turns white. In the next, it explodes with the sound of fire and the horror of realisation. In the numbing aftermath of a bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost.
Two years later, in search of new beginnings, Hiroko travels to Delhi. There she walks into the lives of Konrad’s half-sister, her husband James Burton, and their employee Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she starts to learn Urdu. As the years unravel, new homes replace those left behind and old wars are seamlessly usurped by new conflicts. But the shadows of history – personal and political – are cast over the entwined worlds of the Burtons, Ashrafs and the Tanakas as they are transported from Pakistan to New York, and, ultimately, to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11. The ties that have bound them together over decades and generations are tested to the extreme, with unforeseeable consequences.

From the longlist:

Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo (UK)

Welcome to a world turned upside down. Welcome to the word of Doris. One minute she’s playing hide-and-seek with her sisters in the fields behind their cottage. The next, someone puts a bag over her head and she ends up in the stinking hold of a slave ship sailing to the New World.
When she eventually arrives on a strange tropical island, Doris discovers she is, in fact, a pig-ugly savage with a brain the size of a pea, whose only purpose in life is to please her mistress. Things don’t get any better when she becomes personal assistant to the formidable Bwana, a.k.a. Chief Kaga Konata Katumba I, or when she experiences the horrors of life in the sugarcane fields, where slaves are worked to death under the blazing sun. And all the while she dreams of escape, of finding those she has loved and lost, and returning home to her motherland, England…

Strange Music by Laura Fish (UK)

In 1837, an ailing Elizabeth Barrett is confined to bed, suffering debilitating illness. Longing for a return to mobility, she corresponds with friends, endures uncomfortable remedies, writes poetry and frets over her father and siblings. On the Barrett estate in Jamaica a Creole maidservant named Kaydia is struggling to save her child from the abusive attentions of the master. In the cane fields, indentured labourer and former slave Sheba mourns the loss of her lover.
Moving from Torquay in Devon to Cinnamon Hill in Jamaica, Strange Music explores the notion that history consists of multiple, even contradictory, notions. Kaydia and Sheba narrate their stories in a distinctive patois. Like Jamaica, they struggle to escape a tragic past that seems ever present. Elizabeth is geographically and emotionally distant, at once consumed with domestic minutiae and, as she matures as a writer, painfully aware of the source of her wealth and privilege.

Love Marriage V. V. Ganeshananthan (USA)

'In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak only of two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage. In reality, there is a whole spectrum in between, but most of us spend years running away from the first towards the second.
Among the categories that bleed outside these two carefully delineated boundaries: the Self-Arranged Marriage, the Outside Marriage, the Cousin Marriage, the Village Marriage, the Marriage Abroad. There is the Marriage Without Consent. There is the Marriage Under Pressure. There is even Marrying the Enemy, who, it turns out, is not the Enemy at all.’
Yalini (the narrator and the end product of many marriages) and her generation are the children of their parents. But they live in other countries where the old rules of marriage – Love Marriage, Arranged Marriage and everything in between – do not apply. And parents who left Sri Lanka to escape the ethnic violence and to give their children opportunity, look on helplessly as those children embrace the one opportunity they didn’t intend them to take: Western Marriage.

The Lost Dog by Michelle De Kretser (Sri Lanka / Australia)

Tom Loxley is holed up in a remote cottage in the bush, trying to finish his book on Henry James, when his dog goes missing, trailing a length of orange twine tied with firm knots. The house belongs to Nelly Zhang, an elusive artist with whom Tom has become enthralled.
The novel loops back and forth in time from an Anglo-Indian childhood to the brittle contemporary Melbourne art scene, from Tom’s scratchy, poignant relationship with his ailing mother, to the unanswered puzzles of Nelly’s past.

A Mercy by Toni Morrison (USA)

In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were planted and took root.
Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in ‘flesh’, he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, ‘with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady.’ Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, but later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.
There are other voices and other stories: Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, a victim of religious intolerance back in England; Sorrow, a strange girl who spent her early years at sea; and finally, Florens’ mother, who cast off her daughter in order to save her, leaving a child who may never exorcise that abandonment…

Evening is the Whole Day by Preeta Samarasan (Malaysia)

When the family’s servant girl, Chellam, is dismissed from the Big House, it is only the latest in a series of losses that have shaken six-year-old Aasha’s life. Her grandmother has died under mysterious circumstances and her older sister has disappeared for a new life abroad. Her parents, meanwhile, seem to be hiding something – from themselves and from each other.As the story of the Rajesekharan family unfolds, we learn what has happened to their hopes and dreams. What brought them to the Big House in troubled, post-colonial Malaysia? What was Chellam’s unforgiveable crime? What is Appa – the respectable family patriarch – hiding from his wife and children? And why did his eldest daughter leave the country under strained circumstances?

Hey, English is not the only language in which fiction is written!

The International Prize for Arabic Fiction, a sort of Booker Prize of the Arab World, was awarded to Youssef Ziedan of Egypt for his controversial novel Azazeel (to be translated into English as "Beelzebub"). The novel speaks about religious fanaticism and mob violence among early Christians in Roman Egypt. Of course the Coptic Christians wanted it banned, but isn't it the case of too many fiction books on the Arab world? To take a stand on this is quite tricky I would say, since I gather that Copts (10 million in Egypt) are being discriminated in Egypt. I would like, instead, to emphasize the fact that Egyptian writers seem to be the most appreciated in the Arab world (or maybe by the western audiences?), starting from Ala Al-Aswani.

Here's the plot of Azazeel from an article taken from The Guardian:

"[Azazeel are] the memoirs of a fifth-century doctor-­monk and passionate lover named Hypa, whose scrolls are unearthed by a 20th-century translator. Born in AD 391, when Christianity was imposed as Roman Egypt's official religion, Hypa wanders east to the Holy Land after witnessing a mob of Alexandrian Christians lynching a woman, Hypatia, the neo-platonic philosopher and mathematician who defended science against religion. Ziedan sees the lynching as a symptom of religious intolerance, and the start of a scientific dark age.
The fictional monk stumbles on another historical conflict, between the Coptic Bishop Cyril of Alexandria, and Nestorius, the Syrian-born patriarch of Constantinople whom Cyril deposed as a heretic in a schism of AD 431."

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize: because literature is not only what is written in English, as most British - American people uncounsciously assume... It is nonetheless sad that what is awarded and thus considered in the English-speaking world is always what is indeed translated, which is a small part of the great literature that the world produces. I would like to hear more about English or American people who read fiction directly in French or Spanish.

Three considerations: 1) I'm happy for Colombian fiction that dominates with 2 books, demonstrating that it's not only Garcia Marquez that matters 2) A novel from such a minor language as Albanian has been translated and nominated and I'm happy because as an Italian I feel Albania particularly close 3) Two non-European languages (Chinese and Hebrew) appear on the list, which is extremely good.

Voiceover by Céline Curiol, translated by Sam Richard from the French
Beijing Coma by Ma Jian, translated by Flora Drew from the Chinese
The Siege by Ismail Kadaré, translated by David Bellos from the Albanian
The Armies by Evelio Rosero, translated by Anne McLean from the Spanish
The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, translated by Anne McLean from the Spanish
Friendly Fire by A B Yehoshua, translated by Stuart Schoffman from the Hebrew

PS: I've been receiving comments like "Hey, is The Siege any good?". I'd like to inform you that I didn't read all the novels I name in my blog, especially when I'm giving news on the literary prizes!

Orange Prize for Fiction 2009 - Longlist

The Orange Prize for Fiction is awarded to novels written in the English language and written by women. This is the longlist for this year (I have highlighted what appeals to my senses as a reader and I will be giving you the plots in a nice post pretty soon):

"The Household Guide to Dying" by Debra Adelaide (Australia)
"Girl in a Blue Dress" by Gaynor Arnold (UK)
"Their Finest Hour and a Half" by Lissa Evans (UK)
"Blonde Roots" by Bernardine Evaristo (UK)
"Scottsboro" by Ellen Feldman (USA)
"Strange Music" by Laura Fish (UK)
"Love Marriage" by V.V. Ganeshananthan (USA)
"Intuition" by Allegra Goodman (USA)
"The Wilderness" by Samantha Harvey (UK)
"The Invention of Everything Less" by Samantha Hunt (USA)
"The Lost Dog" by Michelle de Kretser (Sri Lanka/Australia)
"Molly Fox's Birthday" by Deirdre Madden (Ireland)
"A Mercy" by Toni Morrison (USA)
"The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight" by Gina Oschner (USA)
"Home" by Marilynne Robinson (USA)
"Evening is the Whole Day" by Preeta Samarasan (Malaysia)
"Burnt Shadows" by Kamila Shamsie (Pakistan)
"American Wife" by Curtis Settenfeld (USA)
"The Flying Troutmans" by Miriam Toews (Canada)
"The Personal History of Rachel DuPree" by Ann Weisgarber (USA)

Man Booker International Prize 2009

The Man Booker International Prize differs from the annual Man Booker Prize for fiction in that it highlights one writer's continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage (sort of like the Nobel Prize in Literature I would say). It is awarded every two years. This year's contestants are:

Peter Carey (Australia)
Evan S. Connell (USA)
Mahasweta Devi (India)
E.L. Doctorow (USA)
James Kelman (UK)
Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)
Arnošt Lustig (Czechoslovakia)
Alice Munro (Canada)
V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad/India)
Joyce Carol Oates (USA)
Antonio Tabucchi (Italy)
Ngugi Wa Thiong'O (Kenya)
Dubravka Ugresic (Croatia)
Ludmila Ulitskaya (Russia)

I am proud that there is an Italian author on the list. I have always wanted to read Tabucchi's Sostiene Pereira, set in 1930s Portugal during Salazar's dictatorship, and I hope this will give me a push and make me buy the book on my next trip to Italy. I have read a couple of novels by Vargas Llosa (El paraiso en la otra esquina and Los cachorros) and I think he is a wonderful writer. I also want to read La tia Julia y el Escribidor some time soon. Of course, I'd love to read a book by any of these writers, it's just amazing that even though you keep reading and reading there are always some writers you haven't still "tried"...

Commonwealth Writers' Prize - Regional Winners

The Regional Winners for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize have been announced yesterday. Here they are:

Best Book
Mandla Langa (South Africa) The Lost Colours of the Chameleon
Marina Endicott (Canada) Good to a Fault
Jhumpa Lahiri (United Kingdom) Unaccustomed Earth
Christos Tsiolkas (Australia) The Slap

Best First Book
Uwem Akpan (Nigeria) Say You're One of Them
Joan Thomas (Canada) Reading By Lightning
Mohammed Hanif (Pakistan) A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Mo Zhi Hong (New Zealand) The Year of The Shanghai Shark

I was right about Jhumpa Lahiri winning over Salman Rushdie, Mohammed Hanif and Uwem Akpan, but I didn't expect Aravind Adiga not to win (he was nominated in two categories!). It proves that the Commonwealth Writers' Prize it's independent from the Booker Prize.

Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2009 - Shortlist

The shortlist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2009 has been announced and we will know the eight regional winners in a few days.
Now, I would like to comment on the prize and on the shortlist. Four years ago Amitav Ghosh (the writer of, among others, Sea of Poppies, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and on my TBR list), withdrew from the competition criticizing the fact that only books written in English can enter the competion, thus ignoring books written in the vernacular languages. Salman Rushdie even wrote an angry essay called "Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist", where he argues that literature is not an expression of nationality. As a matter of fact, looking at this shortlist, it is difficult to label writers. For what reason do you label The White Tiger as an Australian book and put him in the first section, instead of the second? Even though Adiga has dual citizenship, Indian and Australian, The White Tiger is an Indian book, no matter what you say. And what about Jhumpa Lahiri (writer of The Namesake)? She considers herself an American and that should be it. But then she could not enter the competition, so here you go, let's label her as an English writer (she might have English citizenship because she was born in London, even though she grew up in the States).

Best Book Award: South East Asia and the South Pacific
Aravind Adiga “Between the Assassinations” (India/Australia)
Helen Garner “The Spare Room “ (Australia)
Joan London “The Good Parents” (Australia)
Paula Morris “Forbidden Cities” (New Zealand)
Christos Tsiolkas “The Slap” (Australia)
Tim Winton “Breath” (Australia)

Best First Book Award: South East Asia and the South Pacific
Aravind Adiga “The White Tiger” (Australia)
Nam Le “The Boat” (Australia)
Mo Zhi Hong “The Year of the Shanghai Shark” (NZ)
Bridget Van der Zijpp “Misconduct” (NZ)
Preeta Samarasan “Evening is the Whole Day” (Malaysia)
Ashley Sievwright “The Shallow End Clouds of Magellan” (Australia)

Best Book Award : Europe and South Asia
Chris Cleave “The Other Hand” (UK)
Shashi Deshpande “The Country of Deceit” (India)
Philip Hensher “The Northern Clemency” (UK)
Jhumpa Lahiri “Unaccustomed Earth” (UK)
David Lodge “Deaf Sentence” (UK)
Salman Rushdie “The Enchantress of Florence” (UK)

Best First Book Award: Europe and South Asia
Sulaiman Addonia “The Consequences of Love” (UK)
Daniel Clay “Broken” UK
Joe Dunthorne “Submarine” (UK)
Mohammed Hanif “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” (Pakistan)
Murzaban F. Shroff “Breathless in Bombay” (India)

Best Book Award: Canada and the Caribbean
Marina Endicott “Good to a Fault” (Canada)
Kenneth J Harvey “Blackstrap Hawco” (Canada)
Nino Ricci “The Origin of Species (Canada)
Jacob Ross “Pynter Bender” (Grenada)
Jaspreet Singh “Chef” (Canada)
Fred Stenson “The Great Karoo” (Canada)

Best First Book Award: Canada and the Caribbean
Theanna Bischoff “Cleavage” (Canada)
Mark Blagrave “Silver Salts” (Canada)
Craig Boyko “Blackouts” (Canada)
Nila Gupta “The Sherpa and other Fictions” (Canada)
Pasha Malla “The Withdrawal Method” (Canada)
Joan Thomas “Reading By Lightning” (Canada)
Padma Viswanathan “The Toss of a Lemon” (Canada)

Best Book Award: Africa
Damon Galgut "The Imposter" (South Africa)
Tim Keegan "My Life with the Duvals" (South Africa)
Mandla Langa "The Lost Colours of the Chameleon" (South Africa)
Sindiwe Magona "Beauty’s Gift" (South Africa)
Zoë Wicomb "The One That Got Away" (South Africa)

Best First Book Award: Africa
Uwem Akpan "Say You‘re One of Them" (Nigeria)
Jane Bennett "Porcupine" (South Africa)
Jassy Mackenzie "Random Violence" (South Africa)
Chris Marnewick "Shepherds and Butchers" (South Africa)
Sue Rabie "Boston Snowplough" (South Africa)
Megan Voysey-Braig "Till We Can Keep an Animal" (South Africa)

My prediction: Aravind Adiga only for The White Tiger, Jhumpa Lahiri over Salman Rushdie, A Case of Exploding Mangoes (Pakistan's long-awaited literary revenge over India) and Say You're One of Them for Africa's best first book (I haven't read it but it was on recommended books at Waterstone's, so it means it's got to be good).

The Guardian First Book Award - Winner Announced

"The Rest is Noise" by Alex Ross is the winner of the The Guardian First Book Award 2008. It is a non-fiction book, an history of 20th-century music to be precise.

Personally, I think that fiction and non-fiction should be separated in literary prizes. You cannot really compare them, and while some people read only fiction, other people prefer essays.

Also, I was disappointed that A Case of Exploding Mangoes or A Fraction of the Whole did not win, because I'm really looking forward to read them (apart from the fact that the second "puts me down" as it's 700-pages long and I'm biased against long novels).

These were the other contestants: A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammad Hanif (Pakistan), A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz (Australia), God's Own Country by Ross Raisin (UK) and Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews (UK).

See these other posts on the longlist and shortlist for this prize.

Costa Book Awards' shortlist 2008

Shortlist for the Costa Book Award, a popular prize here in the UK (it used to be called Whitbread, I think). I'm not particularly thrilled by this shortlist, apart from maybe Sebastian Barry and Sadie Jones.

Novel Award Shortlist

• The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry: an alternative history of Ireland told through the journals of an old woman and her psychiatrist. Already shortlisted for the Booker Prize;
• The Other Hand by Chris Cleave: the intertwined stories of an African girl and a British magazine editor
• A Partisan's Daughter by Louis de Bernières: about the friendship between a man trapped in a loveless marriage and the Yugoslavian he mistakes for a hooker
• Trauma by Patrick McGrath: the story of a conflicted New York psychiatrist

First Novel Award Shortlist

• The Behaviour of Moths by Poppy Adams: about the secrets that separate two sisters
• The Outcast by Sadie Jones: set in the 1950s, about a 19-year-old boy just out of jail
• Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith: a thriller set in Stalinist Russia
• Inside the Whale by Jennie Rooney: the story of two characters separated by the second world war
  

The Guardian First Book Award - Shortlist

This is the shortlist for the Guardian's First Book Award:

• A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammad Hanif (Pakistan): also longlisted for the Booker Prize
• A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz (Australia): also shortlisted for the Booker Prize
• God's Own Country by Ross Raisin (UK)
• The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross (USA): non-fiction
• Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews (UK): non-fiction

My bet is on one of the first two titles, even though I haven't read them yet (They are never available at the library, guess why?).