In ‘Retrospective’ we look at the high
and low points in the literary world, the awards galore and the
loss of some great ones.
Doris Lessing wins Nobel Prize 2007 for Literature
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Doris
Lessing, the Persian-born, Rhodesian-raised and London-residing
novelist whose deeply autobiographical writing has swept
across continents and reflects her engagement with the social
and political issues of her time, won the 2007 Nobel Prize
in Literature on October 11, 2007.
Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy described
her as “that epicist of the female experience, who
with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected
a divided civilization to scrutiny.” The award comes
with a 10 million Swedish crown honorarium, about $1.6 million.
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| Doris
Lessing |
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Lessing, who turned 88 later in October, never finished
high school and largely educated herself through voracious reading.
She has written dozens of books of fiction, as well as plays, non-fiction
and two volumes of autobiography. She is the 11th woman to win the
Nobel Prize in Literature.
Lessing’s strongest legacy may be that she
inspired a generation of feminists with her breakthrough novel,
The Golden Notebook. In its citation, the Swedish
Academy said: “The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as
a pioneering work, and it belongs to the handful of books that
informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship.”
Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in 1919 in what
is now Iran. Her father was a bank clerk, and her mother was trained
as a nurse. Lured by the promise of farming riches, the family
moved to what is now Zimbabwe, where Lessing had what she
has called a painful childhood.
When The Golden Notebook was first published in the United
States, Lessing was still unknown. Robert Gottlieb, then her
editor at Simon & Schuster and later at Alfred A. Knopf, said
it sold only 6,000 copies.
Speaking from Frankfurt during its annual international
book fair, Jane Friedman, president and chief executive of HarperCollins,
which has published Ms. Lessing in the United States and Britain
for the last 20 years, said that “for women and for literature,
Doris Lessing is a mother to us all.”
Lessing’s other novels include The Good Terrorist and Martha Quest. Her latest novel is The Cleft, published by
HarperCollins in July. She has dabbled in science fiction, and
some of her later works bear the imprint of her interest in Sufi
mysticism, which she has interpreted as stressing a link between
the fates of individuals and society.
- The New York Times.
NY Times Link
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Chinua Achebe won the Man Booker International Prize for the year 2007.
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MAN
BOOKER 2007
One-off award announced as part of 40th anniversary celebrations
The Man Booker Prize for Fiction announced on February
21, 2008, a one-off award – The Best of the Booker –
to celebrate the prestigious literary prize’s 40th anniversary.
The Best of the Booker will honour the best overall novel to have
won the prize since it was first awarded on 22 April 1969. 41
novels will be eligible for the award as there were two winners
in both 1974 and in 1992.
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This
is the second time that a celebratory award has been created
by the prize. In 1993 – the 25th anniversary –
Salman Rushdie won the Booker of Bookers with the 1981 winning
novel Midnight’s Children following the decision by
a judging panel which included Malcolm Bradbury, David Holloway
and WL Webb. |
| Mr.Salman Rushdie |
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The Best of the Booker will, for the first time, be inviting
the public to help decide on which novel deserves to take this
prestigious one-off award. The public will choose from a shortlist
of six novels to be selected by a panel judges chaired by Victoria
Glendinning. The two other judges on the panel are writer and
broadcaster Mariella Frostrup and John Mullan, Professor of English
at UCL. Their shortlist will be announced in May, and public voting
began on the Man Booker Prize website.
The top contenders are Yann Martel’s Life of Pi,
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Ondaatje’s
English Patient, Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger and Margaret
Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.
The winner of the Best of the Booker will be announced
at the London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre in July,
accompanied by a series of events debating and celebrating the
prize. The winner will be awarded a custom-made trophy.
The Gathering wins the Man Booker Prize 2007
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Anne
Enright was, on 16 October, named the winner of the £50,000
Man Booker Prize for Fiction for her novel The Gathering,
published by Jonathan Cape.
Enright, 45, is the second Irish woman to win the prize,
joining compatriots Iris Murdoch, Roddy Doyle and John Banville
who won the prize in 1978, 1993 and 2005 respectively.
Chair of the judges, Howard Davies, made the announcement,
which was broadcast live on the BBC Ten O’ Clock News,
at the awards dinner at the Guildhall, London. |
| Ms. Anne Enright |
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Enright is preparing for a gruelling world tour in 2008.
Her publishers, Jonathan Cape (Random House), are currently putting
together her 2008 schedule which includes visits to Canada, USA,
Hong Kong, Australia, Columbia, New Zealand and Italy. In the
UK Enright is also expected to be speaking at a host of other
key literary festivals.
The shortlist for Man Booker 2007 was as follows:
The judging panel for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction
included: Howard Davies, Director of the London School of Economics
and Political Science; Wendy Cope, poet; Giles Foden, journalist
and author; Ruth Scurr, biographer and critic and Imogen Stubbs,
actor and writer.
Her prize of £50,000, Anne Enright is guaranteed
a huge increase in sales and recognition worldwide. Each of the
six shortlisted authors, including the winner, receives £2,500
and a designer-bound edition of their book.
When asked what she was going to do with the winnings,
she said she didn’t know - ‘perhaps a new kitchen!’
- and joked that she had bought a new dress that morning which
she was pleased she could now afford.
Indra Sinha nominated for Man Booker Prize
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| Indra Sinha |
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SAHITYA
AKADEMI 2007
Noted Bengali poet and novelist Sunil Gangopadhyay was
elected president of the Sahitya Akademi on February 20, 2008
in New Delhi.
A four-day “Festival of Letters-2008” organised
by the Akademi started in the capital on Wednesday. It started with the inauguration of an exhibition “Akademi-2007”
and it was followed by the presentation of the Akademi awards
for the year 2007 by the Akademi’s president Sunil Gangopadhyay.
Bengali poet Samarendra Sengupta, Kashmiri short story
writer Rattan Lal Shant and Rajasthani critic Kundan Mali were
among other prominent writers to receive the award. The Sahitya
Akademi Award for the English category would be declared later,
according to a statement issued here.
Six novelists besides Amar Kant, who have been conferred
the prestigious literature awards are -
Purabi Bormudoi (Santanukulanandan, Assamese), Veerabhadrappa
(Aramane, Kannada), Devidas Kadam (Dika, Konkani), A Sethumadhavan
(Adayalangal, Malayalam), B M Maisnamba(Imasi Nurabee, Manipuri)
and Neela Padmanabhan(Llai Uthir Kaalam, Tamil).
The six poets chosen for this year's awards include Samarendra
Sengupta (Amar Samay Alpa, Bengali), Rajendra Shukla (Gazal-Smahita,
Gujarati), Dipak Mishra (Sukha Snahita, Oriya), Jaswant Deed (Kamandal,
Punjabi) and Hari Dutt Sharma, (Lasallatika, Sanskrit).
Gadiyaram Ramakrishna Sarma (Telugu) and Dipak Mishra
(Oriya) were awarded posthumously.
-UNI
Mohsin Hamid wins South Bank Show Award
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2007
shortlisted author wins Literature Award
Mohsin Hamid has been awarded the South Bank Show literature
award for his 2007 Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel The
Reluctant Fundamentalist.
The South Bank Show awards honour achievement in the arts
and were hosted by the show’s presenter, Melvyn Bragg,
at London’s Dorchester Hotel.
Mohsin Hamid was born in 1971 in Pakistan, where he grew
up. He studied at Princeton and Harvard Law School, worked as
a management consultant in New York and now lives in London. The
Reluctant Fundamentalist traces the life and love of Changez,
an idealistic young Muslim man who leaves Pakistan to pursue his
education in the US.
As well as awards for shows and performers across the
arts spectrum, two other authors were awarded by the South Bank
Show awards. JK Rowling received a lifetime achievement award
for her Harry Potter books and Daljit Nagra’s much-praised
poetry debut Look We Have Coming to Dover! took an Arts Council
decibel award.
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| Mohsin Hamid |
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A L KENNEDY WINS 2007 COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR
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Scottish
author AL Kennedy has won the 2007 Costa Book of the Year
award for her fifth novel, Day; the story of a former RAF
prisoner-of-war returning to Germany to confront his demons.
The Costa Awards were previously known as Whitbread Awards.
The Costa Book Awards is one of the most prestigious and
popular literary prizes in the UK and recognises some of
the most enjoyable books of the year by writers based in
the UK and Ireland. |
| Ms. A. L. Kennedy |
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Nominees
Restless by William Boyd (2006 Costa Novel Award winner),
The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney (2006 Costa First Novel
Award winner and overall Costa Book of the Year), Keeping Mum by Brian Thompson, (2006 Costa Biography Award winner), Letter
to Patience by John Haynes, (2006 Costa Poetry Award winner) and
finally, Set in Stone by Linda Newbery (2006 Costa Children's
Book Award winner).
Panel of Judges
Awards Final judging panel
The final judging panel selects the overall Costa Book of the
Year from the five category Award winners. It comprises a Chairman,
an author from each panel and three other people in the public
eye who love reading.
This year's final judging panel comprised:
Joanna Trollope (Chair), David Almond, Danny Danziger, Vicki Feaver,
Alex James, Dylan Jones, Helen Lederer, Emily Maitlis, Polly Samson.
Celebrated novelist Qurratulain Hyder dead
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Celebrated
Urdu novelist Qurratulain Hyder, 80, died in New Delhi,
August 21, 2007, following complications from an old breathing
problem. A throng of grieving admirers laid her to rest
at Jamia Millia Islamia cemetery in Delhi, where she once
taught Urdu literature as professor of the Khan Abdul Ghaffar
Khan Chair.
She began writing at an early age at a time when the novel
had yet to strike roots as a serious genre in the poetry-oriented
world of Urdu literature. Admirers say she purged Urdu novel
of its obsession with fantasy, romance and frivolous realism. |
| Lt. Qurratulain Hyder |
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But critics, including those belonging to the Progressive
Writers’ Association, a group she never cared to indulge,
much less join, never endorsed her romance with the jagirdari
(feudal) order, and her apparent empathy with a new Muslim elite
who studied abroad and joined the colonial civil services.
A prolific writer, Ms Hyder wrote a dozen novels and
novellas, several collections of short stories and has done a
significant amount of translation of classics.
Aag Ka Darya (River of Fire), her magnum opus, is considered
a landmark novel that explored the vast sweep of time and history.
The story of Nilambar Gautam, a forest university student who
travels the country at the time when Buddhist ideas were sweeping
through India is revered as a masterpiece in India and Pakistan
alike.
The magnificent description, the vast continuum of time
and the canvas of the novel won international acclaim for Ms Hyder
years later, but only after she translated the book into English.
She received India’s highest literary award, the
Jnanpith Award, in 1989 for her novel, Aakhir-i-Shab ke Hamsafar
(Travellers Unto the Night). Other awards included the Sahitya
Akademi Award, in 1967, Soviet Land Nehru Award, 1969, Ghalib
Award, 1985, Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan by the Government of
India for her outstanding contribution to Urdu literature.
She served as a guest lecturer at the universities of
California, Chicago, Wisconsin, and Arizona and was managing editor
of the magazine, Imprint, Mumbai (1964-68), and a member of the
editorial staff of the Illustrated Weekly of India (1968-75).
Her other books include Patjhar ki Awaz (‘The Voice
of Autumn’, 1965); Roushni ki Raftar (‘The Speed of
Light’, 1982); the short novel Chae ke Bagh (‘Tea
Plantations’, 1965); and the family chronicle, Kare Jahan
Daraz Hai (‘The Work of the World Goes on’).
Dawn Link
Author Norman Mailer dies at 84
Norman Mailer, one of the last surviving literary lions
to roar out of World War II, died Saturday morning.
Mailer, 84, died of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital
in New York, said J. Michael Lennon, his literary executor.
In a feisty career of highs and lows, Mailer wrote more than 30
books, won two Pulitzer Prizes and managed to be mentioned in
everything from the TV show King of the Hill to John Lennon's
Give Peace A Chance.
As a novelist, essayist and reporter, he took on celebrities,
war, politics, boxing, God, sex and perhaps his favorite theme,
the battle between good and evil.
