The UK’s 2023 Women’s Prize has been awarded to Barbara Kingsolver for Demon Copperhead, her retelling of Dickens’ David Copperfield set in modern-day Appalachia. She is the first author to win the prize twice, after winning in 2010 for The Lacuna. Kingsolver also received the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Demon Copperhead. She was … Continue reading “What the Dickens? 2023 Women’s Prize Winner”
Britain’s Women’s Prize for Fiction has been awarded to a book narrated by a book. American-Canadian author Ruth Ozeki’s fourth novel has the philosophical title The Book of Form and Emptiness, perhaps no surprise from an author who combines writing, teaching and being a Zen Buddhist priest. The teenage protagonist Benny finds the Book when … Continue reading “Women’s Prize for Fiction Winner 2022”
Damon Galgut had been shortlisted twice before but 2021 was third time lucky. His novel The Promise mixes the history of a family and his country over four decades. The titular promise shows up power, class and racial divisions in South Africa. Galgut, who was born in 1963, explicitly connects the novel to the political … Continue reading “A South African Author Wins the 2021 Booker Prize”
The 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to Abdulrazak Gurnah from Tanzania, whose own experience of colonialism and exile have informed his ten novels as well as short stories and academic works. Gurnah was born in 1948 and brought in the island nation of Zanzibar off the coast of East Africa. At the … Continue reading “2021 Nobel Prize for Literature Turns the Spotlight on East Africa”
The 2021 UK Women’s Prize for Fiction has been won by Susanna Clarke for Piranesi, only her second novel, published 16 years after her immensely popular Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Like its predecessor, Piranesi is an experimental novel in the realm of fantasy. Piranesi lives alone in an immense labyrinthine house surrounded by sea. … Continue reading “2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction Winner”
The longlist has been announced for Britain’s Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021, which will be awarded in July. The prize was created after the 1991 Booker shortlist contained no books by women writers. To celebrate its 25th year, readers voted for a “winner of winners”: Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, … Continue reading “Women’s Prize Book News”
Britain’s most prestigious literary prize this year was awarded on 19 November to one of four debut novels in the shortlist: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, a story of family love and addiction in recession-hit 1980s Glasgow. The story is set in the era of Thatcherism and deindustrialisation. For working-class families, times were hard. When … Continue reading “The 2020 Booker Prize Goes to First-time Scottish Author”
The 2019 Booker prize has been awarded to two authors: the established star Margaret Atwood for The Testaments and the first ever black woman winner Bernardine Evaristo for Woman, Girl, Other. Atwood’s long-awaited sequel to A Handmaid’s Tale seemed a shoe-in for the prize (although another literary icon, Salman Rushdie was also on the short-list). … Continue reading “Two Books for the Booker”
The winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize is a book about a divided society. Its author, Anna Burns, hails from Belfast, and the unnamed city in Milkman has echoes of the Northern Irish capital during the Troubles. But, as the chair of judges Kwame Anthony Appiah says, is about what happens in sectarian societies … Continue reading “Northern Irish Novel Wins 2018 Booker Prize”
