Good News from the Suburbs

Steven Caroll takes this year's Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia's most prestigious prize, with his novel The Time We Have Taken which the judges called :

... a moving and indelible in its evocation of the extraordinary in ordinary lives.

Carroll who is also a playwright and theatre critic has been nominated for the award twice before - in 2002 for The Art of the Engine Driver (which also won France's Prix Femina for Best Foreign Novel) and in 2005 for The Gift of Speed. The winning novel, which also won the 2008 Commonwealth Prize for the Asia-Pacific region, forms the third part of a trilogy.

Carroll says that he draws his inspiration form the suburbs. On radio show AM he said :

This book, and the three books that constitute the trilogy, are all set in a rectangle of land that is around about a mile and a half long and a half mile wide, out there on the suburban frontier, and right from the start I found in that rectangle of land, not just satire, not just stereotype, and not just TV sitcom, but I found the stuff of literary fiction. ... I've got letters from people from the first two books and they say, what a relief it is to read a book that actually treats the suburbs with a bit of respect and treats the characters from the suburbs with respect. Not as just sort of, you know, stock comic buffoons.

You can read extracts from the novel on the Harper Collins website, and there's more about Carroll's win at The Australian.

Meanwhile, Geraldine Brooks has won Australian Book Industry's Book of the Year Award for People of the Book, described on Brook's website as :

... an intricate, ambitious novel that traces the journey of a rare illuminated Hebrew manuscript from convivencia Spain to the ruins of Sarajevo, from the Silver Age of Venice to the sunburned rock faces of northern Australia.

Inspired by the true story of a mysterious codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah, People of the Book is a sweeping adventure through five centuries of history. From its creation in Muslim-ruled, medieval Spain, the illuminated manuscript makes a series of perilous journeys: through Inquisition-era Venice, fin-de-siecle Vienna, and the Nazi sacking of Sarajevo.

Geraldine Brooks Banned and 36 Others

A book by Pulitzer prize winning author and journalist Geraldine Brooks has joined the ranks of books with a religious theme now banned in the country. The latest list of publications banned by the KDN was made public today. The New Straits Times has the list.

Brooks spent six years covering the Middle East for the Wall Street Journal. Nine Parts of Desire (1994) is her first book, and is "an exploration of the daily life of Muslim women and the often contradictory forces that shape their lives". The books was an international best seller and has been translated into 17 languages.

The book has been available in Malaysian bookshops since its publication (I bought it here). So now of course one wonders just what is behind its banning? And more than that, what the further implications for this society are when information and viewpoints and that have been hitherto been considered a perfectly acceptable part of the country's intellectual discourse are now considered "haram".

(I read the book way back and can still remember her harrowing descriptions of genital mutilation ... time to reread it, I suppose.)

Several other English books are on the list. I've put in links where I can find them.

Unveiled At Last - Bob Sjogren

The Last of the Giants - George Otis Jr

Inside the Community: Understanding Muslims Through Their Traditions - Phil Parshall

Now You Can Know What Muslims Believe (Ministries to Muslims, US = 28 page booklet)

Blind Following of Madhhabs - Shaykh Muhammad Sultaan (Al-Hidaayah Publishing, UK);

My Journey from The Christianity of Ahlul Sunnah Wal Jamaah To The Islam Of The Prophet - Saim Bakar

Answering Islam The Crescent in Light of the Cross - Norman L Geisler, Abdul Saleeb

Islam in Context Past, Present and Future - Peter G. Riddell, Peter Cotterell

Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism, The Limit of Postmodern Analysis - Haideh Moghissi

Islam At The Crossroads Understanding Its Beliefs, History and Conflicts - Paul Marshall, Roberta Green, Lela Gilbert

Glad News! God Loves You My Muslims Friend - Samy Tanagho

The Fifth Pillar A Spiritual Pilgrimage - David Zeidan

Heart of the Koran - Lex Hixton

The Life and Times of Muhammad - Sir John Glubb

Inside Islam The Faith, The People And The Conflicts of the World's Fastest Growing Religion - John Miller,

Jesus and Muhammad Profound Differences and Suprising Similarities - Mark A. Gabriel

Nine Parts of Desire The Hidden World of Islamic Women - Geraldine Brooks

Introducing Islam (The Basics) - Kim Whiteheads

Introducing Islam: Islam, Christianity, and Judaism - Dorothy Kavanaugh

Murder in the Name of Allah -Hazrat Mirza, Tahir Ahmad

The New Paths in Muslim Evangelism, Evangelical, Approaches to Contextualization - Phil Parshall

The full list also includes locally published titles in Malay, and others published in Indonesia.

Postscript:

Australian blogger Happy Antipodean comments on this story.

(Thanks Amir letting me know.)

Writer - Where Do You Belong?

Literature isn't a matter of postcodes or coastlines, it's a matter of obsessions and of the universal human experience.

Thomas Keneally to Geraldine Brooks after her Pulitzer win.

There is a petty meaness in words like these: "So and so is not really a Malaysian/British/American/Australian (fill in the blank for yourself) author because he/she wasn't born here/only lived here for X years/has lived for abroad for X years/doesn't write about living here," especially as so many writers live between cultures and countries.

I think Keneally's quote wraps up the argument quite nicely.