Catch our next monthly writers event:ALIAS GRACE
CAST & CREW
Presenter : The Instant Cafe Theatre Company & Malthouse Theatre with the support of the Australian High Commission
SYNOPSIS:
"Murderess. Murderess. The word rustles like a tafetta skirt across the floor."
In 1844 sixteen-year-old Grace Marks is convicted of the brutal murder of her employer and his pregnant mistress. Eight years later she is offered the chance to redeem herself, but telling a story is never an innocent act.
In her brilliant portrayal of the celebrated murderess in the play alias Grace, award-winning Australian actress Caroline Lee transforms into Marks in a performance as intimate as it is dangerous. The character is based on the real-life Grace Marks, one of the most notorious Canadian women of the 1840s.
Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood's multi-award winning novel, has been adapted for the stage by Laurence Strangio. The KL production is supported by the Australian Government, through the Australia International Cultural Council in commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of Relations between Malaysia and Australia.
Venue : Pentas 2 Duration : 4 - 8 July 2007
Category : Drama Price : RM37 and RM22
I was on a BBC radio programme recently, in conversation with a certain Minister of a certain Religious Affairs Department of a certain Muslim country. The topic of the debate was, of course, the recent furore over the award of a knighthood to the British author Salman Rushdie. In the course of the programme, a number of listeners called in to add their opinions to the debate, with a considerable number of Muslim callers from Europe and North America decrying what they saw as the amateur theatrics of some hot-headed Muslims who had gone on the warpath, condemning Britain, the Queen of England, the West, the ubiquitous global Jewish-Zionist conspiracy, et al. for this affront to Islam…Farish Noor gives his take on Rushdie's knighthood.
... the pious fact-resistant bullies who never read the man they still want dead, the shameless political spivs on a vote-hunt and (worst of the lot, because they would once have known better) the screamingly self-righteous leftist academics who parade their ignorance and malice in sub-literate tirades.And Tonkin reckons that:
Almost the only good thing to emerge from this dismal reprise is a terrific spoof protest invented by the Hindustan Times of Mumbai. Its cod report discloses that an association of people not born at 12 has mounted a campaign against Midnight's Children as a "wilful act of provocation that has hurt the feelings of those who were born at other times of day". "By honouring Rushdie, the Queen has insulted the more productive hours of the day." Moreover, Rushdie himself was not even born at midnight: "He is full of self-hate and has crossed over to the other side to belittle all of us."Amen!
The shortlists for the James Tait Black, Britain's oldest literary award have been announced. The contenders for the fiction prize are:There are some very strong contenders: Orange winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as well as Pulitzer winner Cormac McCarthy and Booker shortlisted Sarah Walters.
- The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
- The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
- Seven Lies by James Lasdun
- Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Electricity by Ray Robinson
But the shortlist also spotlights other excellent works which have slipped a little more below the radar (well my radar at least!): The View from Castle Rock is a collection of stories by Canadian author Alice Munro: in the first part of the book they are based on material Munro uncovered when researching her own family history in Scotland, and in the second, they are based on more autobiographical material. (I've much enjoyed some of Munro's earlier stories - she has to be one of the best short-fiction writers alive.)
Seven Lies is James Lasdun's second novel, and is a thriller set in Berlin and New York. The blurb on the award website describes it as: ... a page-turning study of betrayal, guilt and shame with just enough allegory about it to keep America’s National Security State in unsettling focus.(I can see my friend Kaykay getting all excited about this one!)
Here's a book I started reading about when cruising around the internet at the weekend. Scarcely more cheerful reading than Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but this is a book I'm looking forward to tracking down.
HOWZABOUT A NOVEL OF CONTEMPORARY TIMES, eh? the exotic past is getting really tiring.screamed Viz in the comments to a post a couple of days ago with a request that I actually put this question to the next Malaysian author I meet.
Hello there,Very many thanks, Twan, for taking the time.
I read with interest on Sharon’s blog once again the call for a contemporary Malaysian novel, and I sometimes puzzle over what one should/can write in such a novel. What follows is merely my biased and uninformed and factually unsupported musings and nothing more substantial. And this IS a tongue-in-cheek and light-hearted piece to raise questions for myself and interested persons.
The biggest English language hit in South Africa this year is Spud,
by John van de Ruit. It’s sold about 60,000 copies and more, I was told, which is a huge number for any first book in any country. The novel is something like the diaries of less-neurotic Adrian Mole, young boy Spud’s comic boarding school adventures in a thinly-disguised Michaelhouse (a privileged boarding school, ex alumni included Wilbur Smith). You can easily guess which bodily part the nickname refers to! There's even a sequel out now. Spud has been picked up by Penguin UK for publication later this year.
This made me wonder why countries like Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and India can have novels set in contemporary and near-comtemporary times and do well in the world market. Many of Andre Brink's and J.M. Coetzee's books are set in contemporary South Africa and still can do well (although of course they do go on and on about the historical crimes of apartheid). Yet there are also a large number of South African writers whose appeal seems limited to the local market. And these novels often also have the thread of introspection i.e looking back to the past, running through them. With the success of Spud, though, it appears that readers are getting tired of political topics and want something entertaining.
I’m certain modern Malaysia is interesting to travellers and bargain-hunters and foodies and scuba divers and MM2H applicants and businessmen. But is it interesting and entertaining enough to readers around the world? Does the writing of a viable-buyable (to steal from Arundhati Roy) modern Malaysian novel first have to be paved by the existence of large numbers of novels set in the country’s past? Get the punters hooked on the old stories, lay the groundwork so they understand the historical-social contexts before reeling them in with the new? Why is UK literary agent Toby Eady (that’s Mr. Xin Ran and Mr. I–signed-Jung-Chang to you) fishing for new talent in China and not Malaysia? Do readers around the world want novels about contemporary Chinese Sex & The City tales because they understand the context from which these tales are emerging? That these Shopaholic in Shanghai stories are of relatively worldwide interest precisely because of the awareness of China’s past? Awareness created over the decades by novels about its long and troubled past? Is it because they reveal a society in rapid transition, a transition which is of interest precisely because so many novels written and read had been set in its past and so there is a link between the two?
Perhaps writing and selling the modern Malaysian novel is difficult because we’ve been lucky enough to have a relatively strife-free recent history. Conflict, we all know, makes for good reading (and, admittedly, easy writing). Look at the recent novels: The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Half of A Yellow Sun. Is the interest in a country’s conflicted present powered by the desire to comprehend its past, by the glamour of nostalgia? I think readers – well, me in particular anyway - want to understand how a particular modern society came to be as it is today, and what better and more entertaining way than through such novels?
I sometimes compare our situation to our neighbouring countries and their literary scene, and the one country I can think of which has writers coming out with contemporary English-language novels with a ready world market is Thailand.
Thailand – and specifically Bangkok - seems able to come out with whole genre of its own, but almost all the books are written by farangs. And they seem limited to crime fiction and the expats’ experiences with go-go bar girls (yes, I AM generalising here!)... but Thailand has been in the consciousness of people around the world for a long time. And it IS a fascinating country with a personality all its own.
Perhaps one can write about social issues and politics? Say we take the Lina Joy case and write a modern novel about it? Title it "No More Joy" perhaps? Market it like those books about those oh-woe-is-me privileged Gulf Princesses (The Gulf Princess Diaries???) and books like "Not Without My Children".
The BBC Four Samuel Johnson Award for Non-Fiction has gone to Rajiv Chandrasekaran for Imperial Life in the Emerald City, which looks at life in Baghdad's Green Zone. Baroness Helena Kennedy, the Chair of the judges, described it as being:... up there with the greatest reportage of the last 50 years – as fine as Hershey on Hiroshima and Capote’s In Cold Blood. The writing is cool, exact and never overstated and in many places very humorous as the jaw-dropping idiocy of the American action is revealed. Chandrasekaran stands back, detached and collected, from his subject but his reader is left gobsmacked, right in the middle of it.You can watch a short film clip about the book here and find out about the other shortlisted titles here.
Phlip Pullman has been awarded the 'Carnegie of Carnegies' after being voted the favourite winner of the prestigious medal for children's literature in the 70 years it has been awarded. Pullman won the medal in 1985 for Northern Lights, the first part of the His Dark Materials trilogy.(Tom's Midnight Garden and The Owl Service are books I particularly loved as a kid and I'd recommend them strongly even to adults looking to transport themselves through time and different dimensions.)
- Skellig David Almond (1998)
- Junk Melvin Burgess (1996)
- Storm Kevin Crossley-Holland (1985)
- A Gathering Light Jennifer Donnelly (2003)
- The Owl Service Alan Garner (1967)
- The Family From One End Street Eve Garnett (1937)
- The Borrowers Mary Norton (1952)
- Tom's Midnight Garden Philippa Pearce (1958)
The top Australian award, the Miles Franklin was won by Alexis Wright for Carpentaria, a portrait of life in the newly established coastal town of Desperance, North Queensland, and the novel is about:... the strained relationship between the white folk of the fictional town of Desperance and the internal struggles of the Indigenous community, who are fighting for survival against an all-powerful mining company.Carpentaria must be quite something to have won from such a strong shortlist where it ran against Peter Carey's Theft (my favourite book of last year), Gail Jones' Sixty Lights, and Deborah Robertson's hotly tipped Careless. Carole Ferriere in the Australian Women's Book Review goes as far as to call Carpentaria the best Australian novel for years.
... aims to honour the craft of translation, and to recognise its cultural importance.
This year's winner was Michael Hofmann for Durs Grunbein's Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems (Faber). Guest judge and literary editor of The Observer Robert McCrum praised Mr Hofmann for his:... startling, and occasionally magical, rendering of Durs Grunbein's Ashes for Breakfast, a new collection from one of Germany's contemporary masters. A vindication of the translator's alchemy, Hofmann's versions do not smell of the lamp. They look like poems that want to be poems. As translations they feel voluntary, unforced.The collection was also shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize last year.
- Joel Agee for Friedrich Durrenmatt, Selected Writings (University of Chicago Press).
- Anthea Bell for Eva Menasse, Vienna (Weidenfeld and Nicolson).
- Robin Kirkpatrick for Dante, Inferno (Penguin).
- Sverre Lyngstad for Dag Solstad, Shyness and Dignity (Harvill Secker).
- Sandra Smith for Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise (Chatto and Windus).
Elsewhere in this Sunday's Starmag's Readsmonthly supplement, the "Celebrity Guest Reviewer"(!) is Gift of Rain author Tan Twan Eng who looks at another historical novel. He doesn't much enjoy Anchee Min's The Last Empress. "Rushed and disjointed", "oversimplified" and "weak and diluted" are some of the adjectives he slings in its direction....one of the very rare, well-written works of fiction by a local author.(Though this sweeping generalisation begs the question, how rare actually is "very rare"??)
But Khoo's latest novel sounds more interesting. Writes Hah:Mamasan is set in 1970s and 1980s Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, in the colourful world of cabarets and nightclubs. Khoo created a host of vividly drawn characters, such as dance hostesses, mamasans (madams), bouncers and the customers who patronise these nightclubs. He steers adroitly clear of stereotyping and addresses hypocrisy and how an external veneer and charm can hide flaws.Nightwing reviews the book favourably on the next page.
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a novel that forces us to imagine the totally unthinkable: What would it be like to be one of the last human beings in a world in which every plant, and tree and creature were long dead? An unnamed boy and his father travel through an American landscape destroyed by nuclear war, all their worldly possessions contained in a shopping cart. The journey itself generates the plot as the pair struggle to survive from one day to the next, always on the brink of starvation.From my review of The Road in StarMag's Readsmonthly supplement. (Read the rest here.)
A good book returns from a good holiday battered and discoloured, with sand in odd crevices, with mysterious stains and pages missing, with mild spinal injuries and a new lover or two. Just like its owner. ... One hardback will have a semi-translucent, coconut-smelling thumb-print on a right-hand page. A paperback will be a fat, crinkly, chlorine-damaged wad after it joined you in the pool when the kids upset your lilo. Another paperback, left splayed for an hour in full sun so that the heat melted the glue in its spine, is shedding pages into your bag. The book becomes a souvenir of the pleasure you took in it and the place where you read it.But what should a holiday read be like? Something light and frothy? The things we've always meant to get round to reading? A big classic novel (which is what Leith himself favours).
Oh dear. What has Mr. Rushdie's knighthood sparked off?
My interview from today's Star with Ronald Carter who co-wrote the Cambridge Grammar of English: A Comprehensive Guide with Michael McCarthy.The Internal Security Ministry allows it to be in the market, as its contents do not jeopardise national security.The book is available, as several of you have dropped by to tell me, in bookshops across the city.
Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who heads the ministry, said it had studied the contents of the book and decided that it should not be subjected to a restriction order under Section 7 (1) of the Printing and Publishing Act 1984.
“The police have also never confiscated or issued warnings on the book,” he said, in a written reply to Chow Kon Yeow (DAP – Tanjong) and M. Kulasegaran (DAP – Ipoh Barat).
The book, May 13: Declassified Documents on the Malaysian Riots of 1969, by academician Dr Kua Kia Soong was snapped up fast after it was launched on that date last month.
Several groups called for the book to be banned, prompting the ministry to pick up 10 copies to “study” it.
In his book, Dr Kua, who spent three months researching the documents at London’s Public Records Office, said the May 13 riots was a coup attempt against the then prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, and not a racial outburst.
Dropped by Silverfish to see what gossip I could glean, and saw on the counter The Missing Arms of Venus de Milo: Reflections on the Science of Attractiveness.We are constantly told that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. But what if, just as our lives are governed by universal physical laws, the notion of beauty could be reduced to a system of immutable facts? Could there be one universal concept of beauty by which we are all measured? In Viren Swami's intriguing investigation into the science of attractiveness, the author sets out to deconstruct the myths and uncover some of the truths about beauty. Taking the Venus de Milo as his constant companion, Swami embarks on a fascinating journey through historical, cultural, economic and social contexts of this age old debate. On his way he encounters an impressive gallery of advocates and adversaries: from Plato to Michelangelo, from Rubens to Manet, from Darwin to Stephan Jay Gould; Shakespeare to Naomi Wolf. The definitive guide to psychologists, art historians and philosophers of science, this highly accessible and wide ranging exploration is also an indispensable introduction for any of us who has ever wondered what constitutes the body beautiful.Viren Swami is currently living in London. He is a Research Associate at the University of Liverpool, UK. He received his doctorate from University College London, where he specialized in evolutionary psychology. His current research interests include interpersonal attraction, especially across cultures, and gender studies. He has also written (with Adrian Furnham) The Psychology of Physical Attraction, as well as numerous psychological studies.
... a devised play exploring the memories, dreams and realities of people living with HIV/AIDS. Each story is written and performed by those who lived them, and we invite you to step into their world and into their lives through this mobile performance experience.Each performance will be followed by a post show talk with the company so that you can discover the process behind this production.
Fallen Leaves is a dreamscape where lives and stories swept to the fringes are collected gently as one. Their sounds chime with the stories of lives lived less ordinary.
So what are you guys reading? For Pak Samad, as he’s widely known, the manuscripts are experimental overtures that are parallel and almost second nature to his work.
“When I write, describe a place, create a mood, drawing helps to extends the possibilities of imagination,” said the 72-year-old in a telephone interview before the launch of Daerah Samad. “I can’t do without those scribbles; they form the heartbeat to my writings.”
The images illuminate the words in compelling ways. For instance, one of his manuscripts appears to detail the thoughts of a person witnessing the marriage of his or her youngest daughter. To this raw and personal rumination, which was initially crossed out and then rewritten, Pak Samad added a swirl of jagged and cursive lines that seem to illustrate internalised and torn emotions.
The array of serviettes, which run through the years, deals with a variety of subjects, ranging from whimsical self-portraits and elaborately penned prose framed around calligraphic blobs and swirls to detailed sketches of those symbols of modernity, a mobile phone, a bottled drink and a wristwatch.The exhibition Daerah Samad: 100 Sketches by A. Samad Said runs until July 15 at Galeri Petronas.
But one of the more compelling sketches is the signature piece of the exhibition, depicting two elegant, willow-like trees shooting out of some shrubs.
Examples of more formal sketches. The words in the sketch on the extreme left tell the thoughts of a father witnessing the marriage of his child while the jagged lines surrounding the words graphically illustrate the strong emotions present.
A discoloured stain, perhaps of coffee, lingers at the side of the red- and black-inked sketch, which, to me, somewhat emphasises how Pak Samad’s creative flights of fancy had to be made concrete on mundane, every day objects like coffee-stained serviettes.
“This particular sketch was about growth, regeneration,” says Pak Samad.
“I can’t quite remember when I did this sketch but I do remember the mood, the feeling and the intention – and that’s all that is important to me.”
Sick at heart I am (still) that I had to miss Karen Armstrong's talk on Saturday. Vision they say is always 20/20 in retrospect, and I realised that although I felt I had to keep a promise I'd made earlier, in actual fact MPH could have managed perfectly well without me - though that event was also useful and I will write about it later. (Note to self: sometimes own needs must be put first and stop saying yes to everyone!)... young people, old people, professionals, locals, foreigners, ambassadors and ceos, writers, priests, men in kopiahs, nuns, women in hijabs, it was a great crowd. i've been to a few conferences and usually i'd be yawning away because everyone's so quiet and serious, but today's energy was good.A Voice came away enthralled, and gives an excellent account of the talk.
A person came to the microphone and call for the government to undo the ban on Armstrong’s book. The crowd immediately gave the person a resounding round of applause. Armstrong completely agreed with the person and continued to say something to the effect that when freedom is suppressed, the human spirit sours and so too religion with it. The call for freedom is all the more impressive because this event was organized by the Institute of Diplomacy and Foreign Relations, an arm of the Malaysian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Syed Hamid Albar, the Malaysian Foreign Minister, was there, sitting by the former PM’s side. Furthermore, since the restriction* on the book began in 2005, the remark is a direct comment against the Abdullah administration.The book referred to here is A History of God which isn't even the only one of Armstrong's books banned! Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet was banned in the same year and The Battle for God: Fundamentalism is Judaism, Christianity and Islam, was gazetted as banned last year. (Severe penalties in place for even possession of banned books - up to 3 years jail or a fine of RM20,000!). No explanation for the ban has ever been made public.
... she said that she wasn't losing any sleep over it and indeed there were many in the West who would like to see her books banned there primarily because of her defense of Islam. But she added that banning books does nothing to further the cause of Islam. "Malaysians are grownups, "she said, and are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves what to think about anything, including religion, a remark which won her great cheers from the crowd.There's a bit more consolation to be gained from the extensive coverage in the Star yesterday, including a report of the event, a Q&A and a lengthy interview with the author by Shahanaaz Habib. The Star has also put up a video of part of the interview which is well worth watching.
My review of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach in the Star today.One might think that Ian McEwan is treading on slightly dangerous ground in his new novella, On Chesil Beach, having chosen for himself a scenario which, for British readers (at least), will bring to mind smutty seaside postcards and sniggered blue jokes: a young couple on honeymoon find themselves unable to consummate their marriage. Instead, he presents us with a heartbreaking tale of misunderstanding and lost love.There's also a very nice review by J.N.C. Tay (Janet trying to be a bit incognito?) of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's, Half A Yellow Sun.It’s the early 1960’s, a few years before the so-called “sexual revolution” and the advent of The Pill and the accompanying shift in moral attitudes. Girls are still expected to “keep themselves” for a future husband and nice girls don’t “go all the way”. Edward and Florence are pretty typical of their time: they come to their wedding night with no sexual experience.
Both are anticipating the now officially sanctioned act of sexual intercourse with trepidation. Edward worries about how the act might be achieved “without absurdity or disappointment” and is afraid of (as he quaintly puts it) “arriving too soon” while Florence has “a visceral dread” of sex which she sees as a physical violation.
To make matters worse, she has been further put off by a sex manual she has read in lieu of being able to have an intimate conversation with the women in her life. Despite its “cheery tones and exclamation marks and numbered illustrations” the book is written in a formal sexual vocabulary that almost makes her gag in places. She though realises that she has signed all rights in the gloomy sacristy after the wedding ceremony and prepares resignedly to meet her fate.
McEwan fills in the story of the couple’s path to the altar in flashbacks, and draws each as a convincing individual. Florence is a talented violinist who dreams of performing with her string quartet at the hallowed Wigmore Hall. Edward is studying history at University College and wants to write biographies. Both are idealists who actively support CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) and, in fact, meet when he encounters her handing out leaflets in Oxford. The later tragedy is compounded by the fact that this is a couple already very much in love. They are physically and intellectually well-matched, and they have already negotiated many of the practical difficulties which might have separated them.
But neither has yet learned how to break free of cloying convention. Neither have an appetite for the heavy roast beef dinner they are served in their room but struggle to finish it because it seems the polite thing to do. They are at liberty to kick off their shoes and run down to the beach but actually don’t because, “for now, the times held them ? a thousand unacknowledged rules still applied.” And so it is with sex.
Marked by clumsiness, down-right ignorance and an inability to communicate with each other about their feelings, their fumbling attempts at intercourse are indeed every bit as disastrous as both feared. McEwan doesn’t flinch from detail (a single kiss is given a page and a half, for example) but the writing is never prurient. Indeed, there really isn’t a word out of place in this beautifully crafted story.
In a moment of disgust and blind panic, Florence rushes out of the room. In their angry confrontation, injured pride stands in the way of any real communication and the conversation has life long repercussions for both.
How ironic it is that in the larger scheme of things their lives are destroyed – not by an atom bomb (as both feared) or by the whims of a dictator (of the sort that Edward is researching) but because the society of the time did not make discussion of intimate matters possible.
The book makes a convincing plea for effective sex education that deserves to be heard in the Malaysia of the early 21st century.
Salman Rushdie is to receive a knighthood in the Queen's birthday honours list for his services to literature, Buckingham Palace announced today.I am thrilled and humbled to receive this great honor, and am very grateful that my work has been recognized in this way.The Times of India has the story.
I wrote at the dining table when I could not use my father's desk because he was working or because a sibling was on the phone. The table, light green and long, was the family dumping ground -- of newspapers, university circulars, wedding invitations, bananas or groundnuts bought on the way home -- and the tiny ants that lived underneath it appeared after breakfast to crowd around bits of sugar or bread. I always cleared a space for myself at one end, opposite the grand old wood-paneled air conditioner, used so rarely that a puff of dust always burst out before cool air followed. It was noisy and, during birthdays when the parlor was filled with friends and food, graduations, baby showers for my sisters, the celebratory party when my mother was appointed registrar, there was always a loud vacuum-like sound of the air conditioner in the background.Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reminisces about the writing desks where she learned to write in this wonderfully atmospheric piece from The Washington Post.
Many good writing things coming your way from those good people at KLue, including a competition for the best 16 words story. Click the poster to enlarge and read.
We've all heard of "cult fiction", but exactly how would you define it?Whatever it is, cult fiction makes the heart beat faster. You discover it by accident, or word of mouth. You love this work, you're excited and disturbed by it, it speaks to you in a way nothing else does, and you're convinced you're the only person who gets it. ... Gradually you discover there are other like-minded nuts out there, and the cult is born. At some point, it may become so huge that it ceases to be a cult (think of Kerouac or Tolkien), but the thrill of belonging to an exclusive club is still there.
She mentions the cult novels and authors of her youth, which were the cult novels of my (quite long ago) youth too: Hermann Hesse, J. G. Ballard, John Fowles and Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Norwegian author Per Petterson has now won his second major literary award for Out Stealing Horses. (You may remember that he also won the 2006 Independent Foreign Fiction Award.)... a poignant and moving tale of a changing perspective on the world ... and of nostalgia for a simpler way of life.while the Irish poet and judge Gerald Dawe called it:
...a wonderfully subtle book. In the background, shadowing it with an almost ghostly narrative, there is the history of how war impacts on families in very different ways.The IMPAC Dublin Prize is the world's richest award, and books are nominated by libraries across the world.
Norwegian Bags Booker prizeDuh!
I'm very happy to see Nigerian author Chinua Acebe honoured with this year's Man Booker International Prize worth £60,000 .In choosing to give the award to a man who is regularly described as the father of modern African literature, the judges have signalled that this new global Booker has achieved the status of an authentic world award in only its second contest.The Guardian website also has a guide to Achebe's life and work and you can read an extract from Things Fall Apart (which is one of my favourite novels) here.
By honouring Achebe they have redressed what is seen in Africa - and beyond - as the acute injustice that he has never received the Nobel prize, allegedly because he has spent his life struggling to break the grip of western stereotypes of Africa. One of his most famous essays is an onslaught against Joseph Conrad's masterpiece Heart of Darkness, a novel about a European's descent into savagery in Africa.
It was 50 years ago this year that I began writing my first novel, Things Fall Apart. It is wonderful to hear that my peers have looked at the body of work I have put together in the last 50 years and judged it deserving of this important recognition. I am grateful.It has, of course, been an amazing week for Nigerian authors (and not just Nigerian - Igbo!) with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie winning the Orange Prize a few days earlier. In an interview with Stephen Moss in the Guardian she talks about the need to get right away from stereotyped views of Africa:
You may remember that Doreen Baigana said something very similar some time back.We have a long history of Africa being seen in ways that are not very complimentary, and in America ... being seen as an African writer comes with baggage that we don't necessarily care for. Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe Aids. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations. I was told by a professor at Johns Hopkins University that he didn't believe my first book ... because it was too familiar to him. In other words, I was writing about middle-class Africans who had cars and who weren't starving to death, and therefore to him it wasn't authentically African. ... People forget that Africa is a place in which class exists," she says. "It's as if Africans are not allowed to have class, that somehow authenticity is synonymous with poverty and demands your pity and your sympathy. Africa is seen as the place where the westerner goes to sort out his morality issues. We see it in films and in lots of books about Africa, and it's very troubling to me.
Chet discovered this great photo by Jack Hess on Flickr. It could have been created specially for me!
Years back when Jo Kukathas asked me if I would try my hand at writing for theatre as she liked the voice in one of my short stories. Until now, I hadn't taken a move to do so and it took another phone call from Jo to prompt me. But I'm very glad I took part in the FIRSTWoRKS Fundamentally Happy Playwriting Workshop organised by Instant Cafe Theatre and led by Singaporean playwright Haresh Sharma (left).
Starting from exercises designed to help us get to know our protagonist, we drafted scenes in the first workshop last month. (The most useful activity was "hot chairing" where we played the role of our characters while being interviewed.)
What an incredible experience it was to have scenes those scenes acted out in this second workshop! My characters came to life in front of my eyes and my dialogue actually sounded quite good.
Biggest thanks to the FIRSTWoRKS team for organising this and inviting me, and to Haresh for his patience and very useful feedback.
