A time to scribble and revel

Perhaps nowhere else, for now, is the printed word in such rude health as in South Asia. The region’s writers have much to cheer. Readers have a raging appetite for text on a page, and they are happy to spend money for it. (Most gratifying, at least for a journalist, is to see the old-fashioned newspaper industry flourish as literacy levels rise and a middle class grows.) Advertisers and sponsors are hungry to reach book readers, reckoning that they are among the region’s wealthier and better educated consumers. As a result, cash-rich banks, insurance and construction companies, among others, fall over each other to stump up for literary festivals and book prizes.

Take the announcement today that 16 novelists have been put on a prize longlist for writing on South Asia. DSC, a big Indian building firm, sponsors the prize and is also part of the largest annual literary festival in India, in Jaipur, which burst at the seams with 200 authors and nearly 100,000 visitors this January. The firm is also involved in a South Asia writing festival that will be held soon in London. This is only the second year of the DSC prize, so it hardly has the pedigree of the Man Booker one, say, which has been around for over four decades. But measure it in hard cash—$50,000 for the DSC award, ₤50,000 for the Booker—the South Asian award starts to look serious.

Full report here Economist blogs

Making the cut

Parvathi Nayar looks at the 13 contenders to the Shortlist.

It's that annual literary phenomenon when even high-minded bookish folk succumb to the lowly art of laying a bet — ie, the Man Booker prize, one of the most prestigious and eagerly followed of all literary awards. Round#1 of the Booker game is the longlist prediction, the “Man Booker Dozen” of 13 books that was announced last month, picked from an even longer list of 138 books.

We're now in Round#2, and the stakes are getting higher. This coming week, on September 6, the Booker shortlist will be announced, and speculation is rife as to which six authors will make the cut from what is a pretty unusual longlist.

Unusual, not just because of the inclusion of smaller publishers and not very well-known authors, but also because four contenders are first time novelists — ie, Stephen Kelman, A.D. Miller, Yvvette Edwards and Patrick McGuinness. What's more, some of the longlist books call into question the accepted wisdom that only “literary fiction” is considered for the Bookers, by dealing with such diverse subject matter as crime in Moscow or a Victorian mystery.

Full report here Hindu

Siddhartha Mukherjee bags Pulitzer Prize

Indian American cancer specialist Siddhartha Mukherjee has bagged this year’s Pulitzer prize in the general non-fiction category for his book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

Delhi-born Mukherjee’s book has been described as “an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science”.

The finalists in the category were The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain by Nicholas Carr and Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne.

An assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at Columbia University Medical Center, Mukherjee had told IANS in December last year: “Cancer is growing dramatically in certain parts of South Asia.”

Mukherjee advocated a strong anti-smoking campaign and breast cancer screening to battle the growing incidence of the disease in India.

Full report here Hindustan Times

The Booker out of the blue

Howard Jacobson's Man Booker Prize for Fiction-winning book, The Finkler Question, opens with the sentence, “He should have seen it coming.”

But did he? Not quite.

“The only inevitability I see about it is that finally I've won it. Often I thought I was never going to win it; never thought that I'll eventually win it this time,” admits Jacobson. Indeed, the Booker for The Finkler Question has surprised many.

That a “seriously funny book,” as it has been described in literary circles, has won the Booker has raised many eyebrows. Speaking from London in a telephone interview, Jacobson is at a loss why. “I don't know why they're surprised. I'm not the first comic novelist to get the Prize. Nor have the past recipients been all dark, serious writers. There was Salman Rushdie, too,” he says.

Then he analyses the cause: “Maybe, it's because I've such a vast volume of comic novels under my belt. But pray, it's not my first book. I've been writing for the past 27 years. Seriously speaking, I'm happy I make people laugh but I don't make them go wild laughing. There is always an issue involved, there are other sentiments.”

Full report here Hindu

'Booker Prize is like backward shining light'

Novelist Howard Jacobson, who won the Man Booker Prize for his The Finkler Question, says the award is like a "backward shining light" that seems to bless all his previous books. "I feel now that the Man Booker couldn't have happened at a more wonderful time. It seems to bless all my previous books. It is like a backward shining light, benefiting all the books I have written," Jacobson told IANS in a telephone interview from London.

"I advise young aspiring writers to read the best of literature. And if they do not succeed early in life, let Howard Jacobson be a lesson that one can succeed even at the age of 68," Jacobson, who is of Jewish origin and often describes himself as a 'Jewish Jane Austen', said.

The Manchester-born Jacobson, who was earlier long-listed twice for the Man Booker Prize - in 2006 for Kalooki Nights and for Who's Sorry Now in 2002, is compared to Philip Roth, the famous American-Jewish novelist.

Full report here Hindustan Times

Howard Jacobson wins Booker Prize

British author Howard Jacobson was the surprise winner of the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday for The Finkler Question, the first comic novel to scoop one of the English-speaking world's most coveted literary awards.

The 68-year-old writer and critic, who specialises in writing about what it means to be Jewish in Britain today, was the rank outsider with bookmaker Ladbrokes ahead of the announcement, while Tom McCarthy's C was firm favourite.

Jacobson, whose first novel appeared 27 years ago, said he had begun to wonder whether he would ever win the prize, now in its 42nd year.

"I was truly flabbergasted," he told reporters after receiving the award in the medieval splendour of London's Guildhall. "I'm so sick of being described as the 'underrated Howard Jacobson'.

"They (Man Booker judges) took me in their arms a little bit in the longlist, the shortlist felt like an embrace. I never thought the affair was going to be consummated."

Full report here Reuters

Magic of an intense universe

Evocative language plays a big part in the telling of this haunting tale about the real world...

Emma Donoghue's Room is one of the six books shortlisted for the 2010 Booker, and certainly the tale of little Jack and his Ma is remarkably well-wrought, and good reading from start to finish. Room is unusual for several reasons, but the most interesting of these is that the language it uses is largely that of a five-year old boy, thus making the narration also an exploration into language and how a writer works at crafting things out of it.

Room is about five-year-old Jack and his mother, ‘Ma.' It's also about Old Nick — the man who kidnapped Ma, when she was 19, keeping her confined in a fortified garden shed, raping her repeatedly over the years that she's been in there. But make no mistake, Room is not a rape and confinement tale because the story-teller is little Jack and the story tells of what he makes of the world. In effect, for the reader, there is always a certain distance from Ma and what she's been living with; we see her as Jack sees her: all he knows of Old Nick is that he comes at night, by which time he's usually “switched off in Wardrobe.” On the occasions when he is not, he can hear Old Nick making the bed creak and he counts the creaks to make him fall asleep. We know what the creaks are of course, but we have no idea what the count will be, and when it comes in, in Jack's child's voice, make no mistake, it's shocking.

Full report here Hindu

A touch of strange: The Booker shortlist

The Booker shortlist doesn’t always offer the best books of the year — judges are fallible, the competition intense, and it often happens that works left off the list continue to find readers and faithful acolytes.

A few years ago, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland failed to make the cut, but did brilliantly despite its omission; this year, David Mitchell’s pyrotechnics in The Thousand Autumns of David Zoet were not sufficient to impress the judges.

But the Booker shortlist is still valuable: the judges may not always pick the perfect books, but they almost always reflect the spirit of the times. The obsession with very English, domestic novels in the 1970s was followed by the rise of the global novel, a period when Ishiguro, Achebe, Rushdie and several others took the prize into far more wide-ranging territory. This year’s shortlist, announced last week, reflects two interesting trends: a growing openness among readers to reading experimental fiction, and the blurring of the line between the novel and other literary forms.

Full report here Business Standard

Peter Carey on Booker shortlist

Australian novelist Peter Carey who has won the Booker Prize twice before is among the six shortlisted for this year’s award, it was announced on Tuesday, Sep 7.

If he gets it again he would become the first writer to have won it three times.

Carey, who previously won for Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2001), has been picked this year for Parrot and Olivier in America, a fictional biography of the philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville.

The novel has been widely acclaimed for the scale of its ambition and its "exuberant imagery’’ but the bookies’ favourite for the £50,000 was said to be the London-based novelist Tom McCarthy’s "C", described as the "story of the birth, life and death of Serge Carrefax, an Englishman born in 1898’’. It has been called a "modern-day Ulysses’’ in its approach to the idea of a novel. The Guardian said it was like a "1960s-style anti-novel that's fundamentally hostile to the notion of character and dramatises, or encodes, a set of ideas concerning subjectivity’’.

Full report here Hindu

Peter Carey, Emma Donoghue Up For Booker Prize

Australian writer Peter Carey moved closer to a literary hat trick Tuesday, Sep 7 when he was named a finalist for fiction's prestigious Booker Prize, an award he has already won twice.

Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America — a U.S. odyssey inspired by philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville — is one of six contenders for the 50,000-pound ($77,000) prize, which guarantees a glut of media attention and a big boost in sales.

Carey took home Bookers in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda and in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang. He would be the first writer to win the prize three times, but is considered a long shot.

The early favorite, according to bookmaker William Hill, is British writer Tom McCarthy, whose wildly experimental C — the story of a technology-obssessed 20th-century everyman — has drawn comparisons to James Joyce.

Full report here NPR


The shortlist
Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America
Emma Donoghue Room
Damon Galgut In a Strange Room
Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question
Andrea Levy The Long Song
Tom McCarthy C

Man Booker Prize launches first-time app

The Man Booker Prize, one of the world's most prestigious prizes for a work of fiction, has created an application in anticipation of its September 7 shortlist announcement. Launched on August 26, the app includes prize archives, audio and video content, and a GPS service, and will update users on the status of the 2010 award.

The Booker Prize app, which seems to be the first of its kind for a literary award, is free of charge and offers access to a full chronological history of the prize, including information about judges, longlists, shortlists, and winning authors and books. Also included are exclusive author interviews, video content, and audio and text extracts from selected titles.

A GPS service allows users to search for a local bookshop or to buy titles directly from online retailers' websites, while updates will keep users informed of the current year's shortlist and winner announcements.

The Man Booker Prize also works with digital book retailer GoSpoken to provide audio and text extracts of the longlisted books direct to T-Mobile phones via internet connection.

Full report here Hindustan Times