First NZwriter to win Best Book award in 18 years
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-