Strictly embargoed until
14,00 hours local time (20,00 hours BST), Sunday 27 May, 2007
The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2007
Overall Best Book and Best First Book Winners Announced at the Calabash International Literary Festival
http://www.commonwealthfoundation.com/culturediversity/writersprize/
First New Zealand writer to win Best Book award in eighteen years
? Lloyd Jones of New Zealand wins Overall Best Book for Mister Pip
? D Y Béchard of Canada wins Overall Best First Book for Vandal Love
The overall winners of the 21st Commonwealth Writers’ Prize were announced today (Sunday 27 May) at the Calabash
International Literary Festival in Jamaica.
Aloun Assamba, Jamaica Minister for Tourism, Entertainment and Culture awarded a cheque for £10,000 for The Overall Best
Book Award to Lloyd Jones for his novel,Mister Pip, the first New Zealand writer to win best book since Janet Frame in
1989. The Overall Best First Book Award of £5,000 was awarded to Vandal Love byD Y Béchard of Canada.
The CWP, an increasingly valued and sought-after award for fiction, is presented annually by the Commonwealth
Foundation. Speaking on behalf of the Pan-Commonwealth judging panel, the Hon Justice Nicholas Hasluck commented:
“ The judging panel had the pleasure of reading a remarkable array of works of fiction in the final phase of the 2007
Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. The entries in each of the two categories offer a fascinating range of uncommon settings
and seductive new voices.
“The winner of the best book award is Lloyd Jones from New Zealand for Mister Pip. This mesmerising story shows how
books can change lives in utterly surprising ways. When a round up of suspects on a war-torn Pacific island leads to an
attempt to seize a fictional character violence comes face to face with the power of the imagination.
The prize for best first book goes to Canadian writer D Y Béchard for Vandal Love. This book is an epic family tale,
poetic and gritty, magical and yet believable, replete with misfits and boxers, giants and runts."
Mark Collins, Director of the Commonwealth Foundation, said, “Throughout the 21 years of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize
we have witnessed how books, with varying degrees, directions, and perspectives, are able to capture the intricate
cultural dimensions within the Commonwealth. Through the Prize, the Foundation is recognizing literature‘s ongoing
strength and influence and its ability to raise awareness of individual, societal and global issues.
The Commonwealth Foundation is also extremely pleased to be able to announce the award at Calabash as this festival is
an increasingly successful and vibrant celebration of culture with which we are happy to be associated.”
Colin Channer, organiser and founder of the Calabash International Literary Festival, commented, “The winner was chosen
with a great degree of care and consideration, but most of all difficulty. The standard was extremely high as usual. The
audience at the 2007 Calabash International Literary Festival was delighted to meet the finalists and hear them read
from their work.”
David Clarke, Chairman of the Macquarie Foundation - the Prize’s supporter in the Europe and South Asia and South East
Asia and South Pacific regions - said: “The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize is a benchmark for literary excellence, that has
recognised many of the world’s finest writers and developed a global audience for emerging talent. As a result, it has
helped to enrich international literature, to the benefit of the reading public. The Macquarie Foundation is proud to be
associated with a prize of this calibre.”
The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize aims to reward the best Commonwealth fiction written in English, by both established and
new writers, and to take their works to a global audience. The Prize is now in its 21st year. It is sponsored and
organised by the Commonwealth Foundation with the support of the Macquarie Foundation.
The distinguished Pan-Commonwealth panel of judges was chaired by Hon Justice Nicholas Hasluck AM (Chair of the
Commonwealth Writers’ Prize), and comprised of the four regional chairpersons and Colin Channer, organiser and founder
of the Calabash Festival. The four regional chairpersons were: Professor Arthur Gakwandi (Africa); Professor Aritha van
Herk (Canada and the Caribbean); Professor Angela Smith (Europe and South Asia); and Dr Christine Prentice (South East
Asia and South Pacific).
The Winners
Overall Winner – Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (Penguin)
Lloyd Jones’ novel is set mainly in a small village on Bougainville, where Matilda attends the school set up by the only
white man in the village, Mr Watts. By his own admission he’s not much of a teacher and proceeds to educate the children
by reading them Great Expectations. Matilda falls in love with the novel and the promise of the next chapter is what
keeps her going; Pip’s story protects her from the horror of what is happening around her – helicopters menacing the
skies above the village and rebel raids on the ground.
After several visits to the village by soldiers, the book goes missing and is then destroyed. Mr Watts encourages the
children to retell the story, the whole being constructed from their remembered fragments. Later, when she has fled the
island for Australia, Matilda reaches for a copy of Great Expectations in the school library and realises that Mr Watts
was reading them his own version of the text, another ‘invention’ of the original.
Lloyd Jones was born in 1955 and lives in Wellington. He will spend a year in Berlin from August 2007 as recipient of
the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers’ Residency.
Penguin New Zealand: 09-4427438
First Book Winner – Vandal Love by D Y Béchard (Doubleday)
Vandal Lovefollows generations of a unique French-Canadian family across North America, and through the twentieth
century, as they struggle to find their place in the world.
A family curse – a genetic trick resulting from centuries of hardship – causes the Hervé children to be born either
giants or runts. Book I of Vandal Love follows the giants’ line, exploring Jude Hervé’s career as a boxer in Georgia and
Louisiana in the 1960s, his escape from that brutal life alone with his baby daughter Isa, and her eventual decision to
enter into a strange, chaste marriage with a much older man.
Book II traces a different kind of life entirely, as the runts of the family discover that their power lies in a kind of
unifying love. François searches for years for his missing father; his own son, Harvey, flees from modern society into
spiritual quests. But none of the Hervés can abandon their longing for a place where they might find others like
themselves.
D.Y. Béchard was born in the mountains of British Columbia to French-Canadian and American parents, and has since lived
throughout Canada and the United States. He currently resides in Montréal.
Doubleday Canada: 416-957-1569
Regional Winners
Best Book Award Best First Book Award
Europe and South Asia
The Perfect Manby Naeem Murr In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar
Africa
The Native Commissioner All We Have Left Unsaidby
by Shaun Johnson by Maxine Case
Canada and the Caribbean
The Friends of Meager Fortune Vandal Love by D.Y. Béchard
by David Adams Richards
South East Asia& South Pacific
Mister PipbyLloyd Jones Tuvaluby Andrew O’Connor
Previous Overall Winners: 2006-2001
Best book Best first book
2006Kate Grenville, The Secret River Mark McWatt
Suspended Sentences: fictions of atonement
2005Andrea Levy, SmallIsland Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus
2004Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
2003Austin Clarke, The Polished Hoe Sarah Hall, Haweswater
2002Richard Flanagan, Manu Herbstein, Ama, A
Gould’s Book of Fish Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade
2001Peter Carey, True History Zadie Smith, White Teeth
of the Kelly Gang
-ends-