The winners of the Lettre Ulysses Award – a prize for book-length reportage that I discussed a few weeks ago – have been announced. Alexandra Fuller’s account of her travels with a white, African mercenary, Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier took the 50,000 Euro first prize while A Season in Mecca: Narrative of a Pilgrimage by Moroccan Abdellah Hammoudi and Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq by Riverbend won the 30,000 Euro second prize and 20,000 Euro third prize, respectively.
Alexandra Fuller wins the Lettre Ulysses Award
Ask Not For Whom The Rooster Crows…
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John Banville’s The Sea wins Booker Prize
Mark will be happy. He recently posted the first three parts of his long interview with John Banville. Maybe now that Banville has won the Booker Prize for his novel, The Sea, Mark will get around to posting the interview’s final installment. From the Times story linked above:The chairman of the judges, Professor John Sutherland, described The Sea as “a masterly study of grief, memory and love recollected”. He hailed the quality of Banville’s writing: “You feel you’re in the presence of a virtuoso. In his hands, language is an instrument.”The Booker is typically a modest mover of books in the States, so it will be interesting to see if Knopf pushes up publication from the current release date of March 21, 2006. Right now only the British edition is available.An excerpt from The SeaFor one last bit of Booker fun before we put it all away until next year, visit this blogger who is almost done reading every book on the longlist (and gave the Banville just one out of five stars.)Update: Looks like Knopf is moving publication up to early November. The American version.
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ToB Crowns a Champion
For those who missed it, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder faced Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in the final. The winner was crowned here. If you’ve got a little time to spare, I encourage you to read all of the judge’s decisions and the accompanying “booth” commentaries from Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner, as I found them to be quite entertaining. Incidentally, I would have liked to have seen Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, and/or Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives, if only to read more people’s thoughts on them, but it’s hard to complain about such a fun enterprise.Bonus Links:Andrew’s review of Remainder.Junot Diaz participates in our Year in Reading.Joshua Ferris participates in our Year in Reading.Garth’s review of Tree of SmokeGarth on Bolano
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Paul Beatty Wins the 2016 Man Booker Prize
Novelist Paul Beatty has won this year’s Man Booker Prize for The Sellout, becoming the first American writer to win the Prize. Our own Matt Seidel reviewed the book earlier this year, calling Beatty’s voice “appealing, erudite, and entertaining”; you can trace those voice’s antecedents in this great piece by Alcy Leyva.
Revisit this year’s Booker Shortlist.