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
Man Gone Down Takes the IMPAC
The 2008-09 book award season has come to a close with the awarding of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award to Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas. You’ll recall that libraries around the world can nominate books for the prize, and these nominations, taken together, comprise a very long longlist. These are then whittled down by judges to a shortlist and then ultimately whittled further leaving a winner.Despite this year’s odd occurrence of an all-male shortlist, the award typically does a very good job of highlighting diverse and often underappreciated titles. Case in point, Man Gone Down is a debut novel put out by independent publishing house Grove/Atlantic. Publishers Weekly writes of the book “For all of the introspection and occasional indulgence in self-pity, the narrator retains a note of hard-won optimism, and Thomas resolutely steers him clear of sentimentality.” And a very brief excerpt is available at the Grove/Atlantic site. Even more interesting, author Thomas is American, but his book was nominated for the longlist by just a single library in Barbados.
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The Favorite Takes Home the Booker
Julian Barnes, a four-time shortlister, has finally won the Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending. It was only the second time in eight years that the favorite with the bettors has won (Wolf Hall was the other).
We called Barnes’s book one of our Most Anticipated for the second half of 2011:
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes: Three-time Man Booker shortlister Julian Barnes has written a new novel, the first since Arthur & George was published in 2005. According to Barnes’ website, The Sense of an Ending is a middle-aged man’s retroactive search for truth about his time as a member of “sex-hungry and book-hungry” adolescent crew, one of whose members meets an untimely end. The title–certainly a nod to Frank Kermode’s classic work of literary theory–suggests that Barnes, true to fashion, will apply the theories of literature to private life, hopefully with the same panache of his earlier novels.
U.S. publisher Knopf was smart to move the publication date up to October 5th. The book was originally slated to come out in the U.S. in January 2012.
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Booker Season
We are swiftly approaching the announcement of the Booker Prize. Britain’s highest award for fiction, the award is fussed over endlessly by the gossip-hungry British press, and, for the winner, the rewards are plentiful, often turning a book into a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. Take Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, for example. This year’s Longlist has been out for a while and the Shortlist will be out in a week. The winner will be crowned on October 19th. For the American reader, it is worth mentioning that this is the first year that American authors are eligible for the Booker. Still, as is often the case, the Longlist includes books that are not currently available in the States, though others have been bestsellers and award winners here. Here are the ones that have excerpts available:The Island Walkers by John Bemrose — excerptHavoc, in Its Third Year by Ronan Bennett — excerptA Blade of Grass by Lewis Desoto — excerptThe Honeymoon by Justin Haythe — excerptThe Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard — excerpt, my reviewCloud Atlas by David Mitchell — excerptThe Master by Colm Toibin — excerptThe Brits love to bet, and the bookmakers over there actually come up with odds and take bets on the Booker each year. According to them Cloud Atlas is the big favourite. And if you don’t believe me when I tell you that the Brits (and the whole of the Commonwealth) get really saucy over the Booker, check out The Bluffer’s Guide to the Booker or better yet, Tibor Fischer’s tell-all about being a Booker Judge.
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Herta Müller Wins the Nobel Prize for Literature
The Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to the 56-year-old German writer Herta Müller. Müller is the author of 19 books. Not all of them have been translated into English and only a handful are anywhere close to being in print. The Prize committee said Müller, “with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.” Müller was born in Romanian and emigrated to Germany in 1987. Her first books were published only in censored versions in Romania. The Nobel’s “bio-bibliography” has more.
It’s not easy at present to get a hold of a book by Müller in the U.S., but doubtless her works that have been translated into English will come back into print quickly. The Appointment was published by Metropolitan books and The Passport by Serpents Tail. Nadirs was brought out by the University of Nebraska Press, and Northwestern University Press put out The Land of Green Plums and Traveling on One Leg. The latter two are technically in print right now though I wouldn’t expect hardly any bookstore to actually have them on the shelves.
Kudos to The Complete Review for calling the Prize for Müller in advance. The Complete Review also has a good deal more information available about Müller.
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McCann wins the IMPAC Award
Colum McCann can add the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award to the long list of accolades he has received for Let the Great World Spin. The book is a Millions Hall of Famer and our coverage of the title has been fairly extensive. Previously: Digging into the 2011 IMPAC Longlist, The Eclectic IMPAC Shortlist Has Arrived.
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