Diaspora in Jaipur, Launch in Delhi

Congrats to Tash Aw whose second novel Map Of The Invisible World is being launched today at the Habitat Centre in Delhi by HarperCollins India, along with Lijia Zhang's Socialism Is Great! A Worker's Memoir Of The New China.

Jabberwock caught the session with Tash, Hari Kunzru, Tahmima Anam and Nadeem Aslan at the Jaipur Literary festival a few days back where the authors on the topic "Diaspora". They talked about heir personal cultural journeys and also about whether or not they felt a responsibility to their country when they wrote ...

Stories of Neglected History

The overall winner of this year's Commonwealth Writer's Prize is African-Canadian novelist Lawrence Hill for The Book of Negroes while the first novel award went to Tahmima Anam for A Golden Age.

Hill (which is, incidentally called Someone Knows My Name in the US for political correctness!*) said of his novel :

The Book of Negroes dramatises the all but forgotten story of 18th Century Africans forced into slavery in the Americas, liberated after many years and miraculously returned to the mother continent in the same lifetime. It was both intimidating and exhilarating to write the novel in the voice of an 18th Century African woman, Aminata. I thought of her as my own daughter and gave her the name of my eldest child, in order to love her sufficiently to lift her off the page.

You can listen to chapter 1 of the novel here.

Tahmima Anam is the first ever Bangladeshi author to win the prize. She says she wrote A Golden Age, because she wanted the story of the Bangladesh war to reach an international audience :

It is a story of great tragedy, but also represents a moment of hope and possibility for my sometimes troubled country.

her book is described by the judges as :

...the first major fictional account in English of the creation of Bangladesh. ... Housewife, widow, and mother, Rehana Haque, exemplifies the power of the individual to resist and ultimately prevail against the ravages of war. The assured and lyrical prose evokes the tumultuous birthing of a new nation in an intensely personal family narrative.

You can read an excerpt here.

More about the prize and winners from Lyndsay Irvine in The Guardian.


(* Of which we had another fine example the other day, of course.)

Animal Snags a Prize

The regional winners of this year's Commonwealth Writers' prizes have been announced, Lindesay Irvine reports in the Guardian, and I'm so happy to read that Indra Sinha's Animal's People (which was also shortlisted for the Booker) took the best book award for the Europe and Asia region. The novel was praised by the judges for :

... its fiercely original, zesty style, coupled with seriousness of theme and intent ...

The regional Best First Book prize went to A Golden Age by Bangladeshi author Tahmima Anam, a fictional account of the war of independence interwoven with her own family's history was described as :

...evocative and sensitive ...

In the in the South East Asia and South Pacific region (our neck of the woods!) the winners were Steve Carroll's The Time We Have Taken (Best Book) and The Anatomy of Wings by Karen Foxlee (Best First Book). (More about the novels on the Australian website.)

In the Africa region, Karen King-Aribisala's novel The Hangman's Game took Best Book. Best First Book went to Imagine This by Sade Adeniran.

In the Canada and Caribbean region, Lawrence Hill won for The Book of Negroes (Best Book) and CS Richardson for The End of the Alphabet (Best First Book).

The overall winner of the Commonwealth Prize will be announced on May 18th, but whoever wins, (and despite the odd way the globe has been divided up into regions) the award has highlighted a clutch of very interesting novels.