This month has seen the announcement of the short lists and finalist for four major literary awards. The most prestigious being the fourth Man Booker International Prize. This award recognises one writer for his or her achievement in fiction, and is awarded every two years. The winner, chosen from the 12 finalists, will be announced at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in May. The list of finalists can be found at the Man Booker Prize website.
The 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize winner will also be announced at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. After selecting Best Book and Best First Book from the four major Commonwealth regions, the judges will decide on the overall winner. The complete list of titles and authors in contention can be found at Commonwealth Writers’ Prize website
The I.M.P.A.C. Dublin Award judges have also announced their selected short listed titles and authors, with the winner being announced in June. All the nominations in the 162 long list were made by libraries around the world and this award has become one of the most richest and prestigious for the winning writer. All details of the long and short listed titles and author information can be found at the I.M.P.A.C. Dublin Award website.
The Orange Prize for Fiction, celebrating fiction written by a woman, has also released the short list of competing titles and authors. These can be found at Orangeprize.co.uk
The overall winner will be announced in June.
The following are three novels selected from the short list for the I.M.P.A.C Dublin Literary Award. Of the ten novels that were chosen for this short list, three were by Australian writers. This for a global award is quite exceptional and shows how Australian literature has developed and become highly acclaimed.
Jasper Jones : a novel is the third publication by Craig Silvey. Set in 1965 it tells the story of Charlie Bucktin, a bookish thirteen year old, who is visited one summer night by Jasper Jones, an outcast in their small mining town. He has come to ask for Charlie’s help, and takes him to a secret glade, where Charlie witnesses Jasper’s horrible discovery. With his secret Charlie is pushed and pulled by a town closing in on itself in fear and suspicion. During that summer he struggles with family and society, and learns some very hard lessons about truth, himself and other people. This novel was winner of the 2009 Indie Book of the year and shortlisted the following year for two major Australian prizes. Craig Silvey was born in 1982 in Western Australia and is now based in Freemantle. He is a musician, singer and songwriter for an Indie band. His first adult novel Rhubarb was published in 2004 and in 2007 he published a children’s book.
Ransom by David Malouf is the retelling of the last part of Homer’s Iliad, set in the final days of the Trojan War. After Achilles withdraws his forces from combat, a move that cripples the Greek army, his best friend, Patroclus, persuades Achilles to let him take the Myrmidons back into combat and to wear Achilles’ armour. AfterTrojan king Priam’s beloved son, Hector, kills Patroclus, guilt, rage and grief drives Achilles on a frenzied quest for revenge that sees him slay Hector and then tie Hector’s corpse to his chariot and drag it around the besieged city. Priam, desperate to stop this desecration decides to visit the enemy camp and offer money in exchange for Hector’s body. David Malouf was born in 1934 in Brisbane. He won the 1996 I.M.P.A.C, Dublin Literary Award for his novel Remembering Babylon. He has also been selected as a finalist for the fourth Man Booker International Award for achievement in fiction. Johnno was his first novel published in 1975 and since then has published seven other much acclaimed and awarded novels, five short story collections, eight poetry collections, several works of non-fiction, a play and three libretti.
After the fire, a still small voice is the debut novel of Evie Wyld. She was born in New South Wales, but has lived most of her adult life in London. She received a BA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and then an MA at Goldsmiths University, London. A collection of short stories was published in 2007. After the fire, a still small voice is the story of two Australian men and the shards of trauma that have made up both lives. Frank and Leon live parallel lives: the narratives begin with young Leon’s father heading to the Korean War and returning badly damaged, having been in a prison camp. He soon runs away, with Leon’s mother giving chase. Later Leon is drafted and faces in Vietnam horrors similar to those that traumatized his father. 40 years later, an adult Frank is living in a decrepit beachfront shack, starting his life over after his girlfriend leaves him. As these two narratives weave around each other, we learn what binds Frank and Leon together, and what may end up keeping them apart.
The following three novels have been selected for the short list of the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction:
The memory of love is the second published novel by Aminatta Forna and has also be selected as the best book in the African region of the 2011 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. It is set in Sierra Leone at the turn of the twenty-first century. British psychiatrist Adrian Lockheart has fled his failing marriage in England and embarks on a temporary post at a Sierra Leone hospital intending to modernize treatment of the long-neglected schizophrenics, transients, and scarred victims of civil war who walk the hospital grounds. He soon meets his match in the elderly ex-professor Elias Cole, who speaks eloquently of his country’s turbulent history, and also of his passion for the wife of a more radically minded colleague whose eventual disappearance Cole may be implicated in. Fate and tragedy intertwine in this stunning and powerful portrait of a country in the aftermath of a decade of civil war. Aminatta Forna was born in 1964 and is of Sierra Leonean and Scottish heritage. She studied Law at University College London and was a Harkness Fellow at the University of California, Berkley. Her first published work in 2003 was a memoir about her childhood in Sierra Leone and her investigation into the conspiracy surrounding her father’s death. She has worked for the BBC and is well known for her three African Documentaries. Her first novel Ancestor stones was published in 2006.
Room : a novel
by Emma Donoghue has also been selected as the Best Book for the Caribbean and Canada region of the 2011 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. In 2010 it also won the Rogers Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize and the Irish Book Award. Five-year-old Jack and his Ma live, eat, play and sleep in one room, an 11×11 foot space that is their prison. They are captives of the terrifying man Jack calls Old Nick. But as Jack grows older and more curious, it becomes clear that the room will not be able to hold him and Ma forever. When their insular world suddenly expands beyond the confines of their four walls, the consequences are piercing and extraordinary. Emma Donoghue was born in 1969 in Dublin. After receiving her BA at University College Dublin she completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge. She has written four plays, the first published in 1993, short stories, radio dramas, screenplays, literary histories and six other novels, the first Stir-fry was published in 1994.In 1998 she moved to Canada, becoming a Canadian citizen in 2004, and she lives in London, Ontario.
Andrew Miller has been awarded the Costa Book Awards 2011, Book of the Year for his novel Pure. Selected from the finalists in five categories – First Novel award, Novel award, Biography award, Poetry award and Children’s Book award – Andrew Miller received the prize of £30,000. This is his sixth novel, and is set in Paris in 1785 just before the French Revolution, with the narrative built around a young engineer, ordered to demolish Paris’s oldest cemetery (Saints Innocents Cemetery) and all that this entails, such as exhumation of the bodies buried there. (For background on the story, read this Guardian article, and this Wikipedia article about Paris’s Catacombs for some extra historical detail.)
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